States requiring CS for all students may be making a mistake: Responding to unfunded mandates

As of this writing, New Jersey and Wyoming are the latest states to require CS for all their students (as described in this article) or to be offered in all their schools (as described in this Code.org post and this news article), respectively.  Wyoming has a particularly hard hill to climb.  As measured by involvement in AP exams, there’s just not much there — only 8 students took the AP CS A exam in the whole state last year, and 13 took AP CS Principles.

In 2014, I wrote an article titled “The Danger of Requiring Computer Science in K-12 Schools.”  I still stand by the claim that we should not mandate computer science for US schoolchildren yet. We don’t know how to do it, and we’re unlikely to fund it to do it well.

I can’t find any news articles describing what funding New Jersey and Wyoming are going to put toward the goal of teaching CS across their state.  How do you teach every student CS or teach CS in every school without any increase in funding?

Based on what we’ve seen in other US states, I predict one of three things will happen:

• States will have to loosen the definition of “computer science,” as happened in South Carolina.  90 classes count for the CS requirement in South Carolina, and only 6 of which have programming in them.  Most of them are about keyboarding skills or application software use. If a state doesn’t fund real CS, something else will have to count as real CS.
• States will rely heavily on virtual high schools and on-line classes to provide CS class “access” without hiring more CS teachers, as we are seeing in several states. That is particularly concerning since recent studies are showing that remedial students do poorly in on-line classes.
• Independent CS classes will be deemed too expensive. Instead, the mandate to teach CS to all will lead to integration into math and science classes, which are already funded. School will have changed the reform, again (see Papert’s “Why School Reform is Impossible.”)

Neither of the first two options furthers the goal of having high-quality CS education for all students. The third one may be the best position, if funding doesn’t appear.