Posts tagged ‘ECEP’
Broadening Participation in Computing is Different in Every State: Michigan as an Example
In December, Rick Adrion, Sarah T. Dunton, Barbara Ericson, Renee Fall, Carol Fletcher, and I published an essay in Communications of the ACM, “U.S. States Must Broaden Participation While Expanding Access to Computer Science Education.” (See link here, and pre-print available at the bottom of this post.). Rick, Renee, Barb, and I were the founders of the ECEP Alliance which helps states and US territories with their computing education policy and practices. Carol is now the PI on ECEP (which feels so great to say — ECEP continues past the founders, with excellent leadership) — the whole leadership team is here. Sarah likely knows more about state-level computing education policy than anyone else in the US. She has worked with individual teams in individual states for years. Our argument is that broadening participation and expanding access are not the same thing. Simply making CS classes available doesn’t get students into those classes. We tell the story of two states (Nevada and Rhode Island) and how CS Ed is growing there.
Barbara and I now live in Michigan. The CSTA, Code.org, and ECEP report 2020 State of Computer Science Education: Illuminating Disparities (see link here) has a sub-report for every US state. Michigan is on page 56. The press release for the 2020 report says that 47% of US high schools now offer CS. Michigan is at 37%. Michigan is the only state (as far as I can tell) that used to have CS teacher certification and pre-service CS but got rid of it (story here).
Also in December, Michigan Department of Education (MDE) released the first “State of Computer Science in Michigan Report” (see link here). The data collection and writing on the report was led by Aman Yadav and Sarah Gretter of Michigan State with Cheryl Wilson of MDE. A quote from page 11: “The trend of declining course offerings continues at the high school level where even fewer high schools offer CS courses. Code.org course offering data suggests that only 23.7% of rural high schools, 28% of town high schools, 29.1% of sub-urban high schools, and 21.7% of city high schools offer CS.” (The numbers on the website are lower than these — Aman and Cheryl kindly sent me an early peek at a revision that they’re posting soon.)
MDE’s numbers are a lot lower than the 37% in the Code.org/CSTA/ECEP report. What’s going on here? My best guess is that CS is rare enough in Michigan that not everybody who fills out a survey knows what the national CS education movement means by “computer science.” We had this a lot in the early days of “Georgia Computes,” too. A principal would say that they teach CS, when they might mean Microsoft Office or Web design (with no HTML, CSS, or JavaScript).
In any case, Michigan is clearly below national averages on providing CS education to its citizens and creating sustainable CS education policy. How do we help Michigan progress in providing computing education to its citizens?
I don’t know. Aman, Barb, and I have had conversations about the potential for growing CS Ed in Michigan. We don’t have the same leverage points in Michigan that we have had in other ECEP states. Michigan is a local control state. Individual local education agencies (LEA’s — sometimes a school district, sometimes a county-wide collection of districts) can make up their own rules on important issues like CS teacher certification. In Georgia and South Carolina, the state government has a lot of control in education, so there was a point of leverage. California is also a local control state, but the California University systems are important to all high schools, so that’s a point of influence. Massachusetts is again a local control state, but the Tech industry is very important to the Boston area, and that’s important to the state. Tech isn’t important in the same way in Michigan. If you read the MDE report, there’s a lot of ambivalence about CS in the state. Administrators aren’t that excited about teaching CS. They don’t see CS education as important for their students. Michigan is a big state, where agriculture and tourism are two of the most significant industries. Manufacturing is a big deal, but manufacturing workers don’t necessarily need to know much about computing. CS isn’t an obvious benefit to much of Michigan.
Aman’s strategy is to grow CS education in the state slowly, to develop pockets of value for CS and success in teaching CS. We have to plant seeds and grow to a critical mass, which seems like the right approach to me. He has projects where he is helping develop teachers and relevant curriculum for CS education in specific counties. He works closely with the MDE. Sarah is involved with Apple’s Developer Academy to open in Detroit (see story here). Michigan does have a powerful and large teacher’s group supporting educational technology, MACUL (Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning, see website), which could be a significant player in growing CS education in the state.
The important point here is that, in the United States, growing CS education is a state-by-state challenge. Each state has its own story and issues.
Pre-print of CACM BPC article
How to organize a state (summit): From ECEP and NCWIT
Soon after we started the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, we were asked: What should a state do first? If they want to improve CS Education, what are the steps?
We developed a four step model — you can see a three minute video on ECEP that includes the four step model here. It was evidence-based in the sense that, yup, we really saw states doing this. We had no causal evidence. I’m not sure that that’s possible in any kind of education public policy research.
One of those steps is “Organize.” Gather your allies. Have meetings where you CS Ed people rub elbows with the state public policymakers, like legislators and staffers in the Department of Education (or Department of Public Instruction, or whatever it’s called in your state).
A lot of states have had summits since then (see a list of some here). Now, working with the fabulous NCWIT team of communicators, graphic designers, and social scientists, ECEP has released a state summit toolkit. We can’t yet tell you how to organize a state. We can tell you how to organize a state summit.
From finding change agents to building a steering committee of diverse stakeholders, convenings play an important role in broadening participation in computing at the state level. ECEP and NCWIT have developed the State Summit Toolkit to assist leadership teams as they organize meetings, events, and summits focused on advancing K-16 computer science education.
A high-level report on the state of computing education policy in US states: Access vs Participation
Interesting analysis from Code.org on the development of policies in US states that promote computing education — see report here, and linked below. The map above is fascinating in that it shows how much computing education has become an issue in all but five states.
The graph below is the one I found confusing.
I’ve been corrected: the first bar says that where the school’s population is 0-25% from under-represented minority groups, 41% of those schools teach CS. Only 27% of mostly-minority schools (75%-100% URM, in the rightmost column) offer CS. This is a measure of which schools offer computer science.
The graph above doesn’t mean that there are any under-represented minority students in any CS classes in any of those high schools. My children’s public high school in Georgia was over 50% URM, but the AP CS class was 90% white and Asian kids. From the data we’ve seen in Georgia (for example, see this blog post), few high schools offer more than one CS class. Even in a 75% URM high school, it’s pretty easy to find 30 white and Asian guys. Of course, we know that there are increasing numbers of women and under-represented minority students in computer science classes, but that’s a completely different statistic from what schools offer CS.
I suspect that the actual participation of URM students in CS is markedly lower than the proportion in the school. In other words, in a high school with 25% URM, I’ll bet that the students in the CS classes are less than 25% URM. Even in a 75% URM high school, I’ll bet that CS participation is less than 75% URM.
Access ≠ participation.
Source: The United States for Computer Science – Code.org – Medium
ECEP has a new home at The University of Texas at Austin: First meeting this week at CSforAll
I can’t tell you how exciting this press release is for me. Rick Adrion, Renee Fall, Barbara Ericson, and I started the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance (http://ecepalliance.org) in 2012 to provide states with support as they broadened participation in computing education. Six years later, we had 16 states and Puerto Rico involved — but we were ready to be done. We all four had worked on previous alliances (CAITE and Georgia Computes) and felt that the movement needed new leaders. I am so very pleased that Carol Fletcher and her wonderful team decided to carry on ECEP, and NSF has agreed to continue funding ECEP as it expands to TWENTY-THREE states and US territories!
ECEP (now based out of UT-Austin) will have its first meeting this week, at Wayne State University in Detroit (where Barbara and I first met in 1983) as part of the CSforAll summit.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the UT STEM Center a three-year $2.5 million grant to lead the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance. ECEP is one of eight Broadening Participation in Computing Alliances (BPC) funded by the NSF to increase the number and diversity of students in K-16 pathways. ECEP works with state leadership teams to achieve this goal through education policy reform. First launched in 2012 through an NSF grant to Georgia Tech and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, ECEP has since grown through four phases from two states to sixteen and Puerto Rico. Building on the existing network of ECEP states noted in the map above, the ECEP leadership team is pleased to announce the fifth phase addition of six new states to the Alliance: Hawaii, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington.
South Carolina requires CS to fulfill high school requirement, and Keyboarding is no longer CS
Pat Yongpradit of Code.org shared some great news with me. Well, it’s not really “new” — it happened back in March 2018. But it was something that both of us worked on, and it was great to finally see it happen.
South Carolina was one of the first ECEP (Expanding Computing Education Pathways) Alliance states. They had one of the first statewide summits on computing education (see blog post here). They were one of the first states to require computer science for all high school students.
The problem was that they didn’t actually require computer science. They allowed some 90 classes to count as CS, and only six actually contained CS content (like programming or algorithms). Even a course on “keyboarding” counted as “CS” under the South Carolina system. South Carolina resisted changing this requirement, as Tony Dillon of the state Department of Education argued (see this blog post). I’ve worried that other states that mandate CS would fall into a similar trap (see blog post here on that).
That changed March 28, 2018 with this memo. South Carolina has computer science standards. Keyboarding no longer counts.
It’s an interesting question how this happened. I know that Pat and others at Code.org have been working a lot in South Carolina. I know that our South Carolina ECEP collaborators, like Eileen Kraemer, Tiffany Barnes, and Mary Lou Maher, have been working tirelessly on the state. I also know that my involvement from Georgia had limited success. As one Department of Education official said when I was working in Columbia, “No professor from Georgia Tech is going to tell me about AP CS.”
My suspicion is that this happened because there was significant internal and external pressure. South Carolina wasn’t going to do much when it was just external pressure. But when it was both, there were changes made.
Pat has promised me that Code.org is going to be helping South Carolina fulfill their plans for new CS requirements.
ECEP 2018: Measuring and Making Progress on Broadening Participation in Computing
The 2018 Annual Meeting of the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance was at Georgia Tech January 26-27. ECEP is an NSF-funded alliance to broaden participation in computing. We had about 90 participants, state leaders from 16 states and Puerto Rico. Attendees were from a range of positions, from state departments of education, state boards of education, STEM centers, non-profits, Governor’s offices, University professors, and CS teachers from elementary or high school. The focus at this meeting was to define what it means to broaden participation in computing (BPC) education for each state. The state teams worked at defining what data variables they needed in order to inform their BPC goals, and how they would know (by looking at those data) if they were making progress towards those goals. You can see the play-by-play with pictures via Twitter hashtag #ECEP2017.
I learned so much at this event. I’m still processing all of it, but here are some of the things that are standing out to me right now.
Caitlin Dooley from Georgia Department of Education gave a terrific talk about the challenges in Georgia. She made the argument that CS is the equity issue of our age. She said that the challenge of getting CS teachers into poorer (low-SES) and rural districts is that teachers are leaving when they have the skillsets. The challenge is to have good school leaders to retain teachers.
Anne DeMallie from Massachusetts gave a compelling talk about how they’re integrating CS across the curriculum, especially in elementary school. Massachusetts and New Jersey are two states that integrated their CS and Digital Literacy standards, trying to make it easier for schools to integrate CS education. I liked the framework she offered on how to think about integrating CS into other subjects: exist, enhance, and extend.
I was impressed by the states who are setting concrete, measurable goals. Alabama has set a goal of every high school student having access to CS education by 2022. South Carolina plans to provide access to CS education in every middle and high school in five years. Maryland has a detailed 15 year plan that gets every student access to high-quality CS education with certified high school teachers. (Seen below, presented by Megean Garvin.)
Kamau Bobb of Constellations gave our keynote (as a “fireside chat” with Debra Richardson). His talk was exciting and challenging. He pointed out that high school CS isn’t going to get kids into University. Pushing CS instead of math and science isn’t helping students get admission to higher education. Schools aren’t held accountable for CS — they’re being held accountable for math, science, and language arts learning. CS has to play a role in meeting student and school needs.
Kamau pointed out that “Segregation is an immutable truth.” One of the stories he told was to about textual literacy. During Reconstruction (starting 1865), leaders realized the critical need for all African-Americans to learn to read. The Georgia Literacy Project to address the dramatic literacy gap was just started in 2010 — 145 years later. How long will it take us to achieve equitable access to computing education?
Most of the time was spent in working meetings — state teams sitting down with data reports, developing plans for broadening participation in CS, and grounding the plans in what data they have and what trends they expect to see in those data. The challenges of gathering data on the ground are huge. I was sitting with one state where a CS teacher on the team pointed out that she had 85 students this year. The Department of Education person from that state did a search, and found that none of those students showed up in their database. Other states pointed out how hard it is to compare data across states. We use AP CS data for these kinds of comparisons, but in some states (like Arkansas), all AP exams are paid for by the state. That means that more kids are taking the exam, which means that the pass rates have a different context.
The amount of support for CS Education from each state varies dramatically. Many states have no one in the Department of Education who is informed about CS. Here in Georgia, we have one full-time CS coordinator, which is terrific. In Arkansas, they have nine full-time CS specialists to help teachers.
It was energizing to be with so many passionate leaders who are working to improve computing education in their state. It’s also amazing to see how much work there is to go to reach everyone with high-quality computing education.
This was the last ECEP meeting organized by this group of NSF Principal Investigators. Rick Adrion, Renee Fall, Barbara Ericson, and I are done when the existing ECEP grant runs out at the end of September. We’ve worked with a new team of PI’s to help them build a proposal for ECEP 2. The amazing Sarah Dunton, the manager of our state and territory alliance, will continue in ECEP 2. The PIs for ECEP 2 are Carol Fletcher, Anne Leftwich, Debra Richardson, Maureen Biggers, and Leigh Ann DeLyser. We’re hoping that they get funded and continue to help states make progress on implementing and broadening computing education.
State of Computing Education in the Commonwealth of Virginia: Guest Blog Post from Rebecca Dovi
Rebecca Dovi of CodeVA contacted me soon after my blog post of last Monday, inspired by Virginia’s new CS Education mandate. The story about the Virginia decision was much more complicated and interesting. I invited her to write a guest blog post, and I’m grateful that she agreed. It’s a fascinating story!
In February 2016 Virginia’s legislature passed House Bill 831 making computer science a part of the core instruction that all students in state must learn. The law mandates specifically “computer science and computational thinking, including computer coding,” be integrated into Virginia’s core standards on coequal standing, in the words of Virginia Secretary of Education Dietra Trent, with English and math. (Bill language http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?161+ful+CHAP0472 )
At CodeVA, core standards had been a “maybe someday” issue on our radar. In terms of strategic planning we were not really considering advocating for core standards until several years out. Then the 2016 legislation cycle started, and with it five separate bills to make computer science count as a foreign language credit.
While standards were not yet something we actively sought, we knew all of these foreign language bills – while well intentioned – were not the means to the end the Virginia Assembly sought to achieve.
Armed with information, CodeVA sought to educate legislators, and in the process was asked instead to propose a substitution. The substitution proposed was the language of HB 831, amending the state’s core education standards enabling legislation. At the insistence of legislators, the bill also originally included a high school mandate and a graduation credit requirement, but CodeVA managed to convince legislators to allow it to use these two items as bargaining chips in negotiations with stakeholders. CodeVA knew these two additional requirements were a bridge too far: previous high school mandates requiring economics and personal finance courses for all high school students still cause issues for many districts around the state already struggling to have enough faculty to teach other subjects.
In the end, all stakeholders involved in the legislation were pleased with the law that was adopted, with acceptance of the final language from advocates representing the state’s superintendents, PTAs, teacher groups, school boards and from some of the state’s most influential school divisions.
Once the governor signed the bill into law, it was up to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) to write standards for the Virginia Board of Education to approve. Virginia has a very prescribed system for developing and maintaining standards. It starts with creating a steering committee of current classroom teachers to act as the primary writing group. Once they have completed drafts multiple review boards give feedback on the standards. The groups weighing in as a part of this formal process include other teachers, educational stakeholders including groups like the Virginia Association of School Superintendents and the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice, universities and community colleges and business and industry. Each external review group makes recommendations and the steering committee reviews and responds. Finally all standards go out for open public review, and public meetings are held across the state. The steering committee begin its formal work in March 2017 and the final draft was ready for the VDOE by October 2017.
The final draft went up for a vote by the Board of Education at its November meeting. While the board minutes of this meeting have not yet been posted (as of Dec 11, 2017) you can watch the video here (link: http://www.doe.virginia.gov/boe/meetings/index.shtml# ). CodeVA’s executive director begins his presentation to the board at the 46:30 mark, and the board discussion of the CS standards continue from there.
The mandate for instruction by districts exists for K-8 and means computer science will be integrated into the core subjects students learn in kindergarten through eighth grade. The committee that wrote the standards was very intentional about how these are designed, so there are a few key differences between the Virginia standards and the national standards. First, they are defined for each grade, not by band. Second, in kindergarten and first grade they are written so a teacher may have students coding, or that teacher may choose to guide a lesson with small groups. Third, all non-coding standards were specifically placed so that they aligned with topics currently covered in core areas. Lastly, a sixth strand for cybersecurity was added.
The law also mandates creating standards for middle school and high school electives. These were defined, but the courses are currently optional for schools. CodeVA was intentional in advocating for this tiered approach to Virginia’s mandate: A school division where all students learn computer science concepts early as tools in math, science, language arts and other core subjects, and where parents come to expect quality offerings at the secondary level for their children, and where employers anticipate a CS-literate community, are more likely to ensure those elective offerings exist.
While schools certainly may use our virtual system to offer online high school elective courses, and while Virginia has offered CS through this online instruction platform for over a decade, Virginia’s new CS law includes no mandate to do so. And online instruction options were not in any way a part of the design of the law or of the resulting standards.
The idea is that the integration in K-8 allows students an “informed option” as they move from middle school to high school. By learning computer science early, they have a better idea of what they might want to pursue as an elective. The plan is to measure impact for the next few years, then evaluate the need for high school mandate or graduation requirements. If after data is collected and evaluated it is decided that the mandate needs to be expanded to high school legislators can certainly go back seeking further requirements. Right now we are asking legislators to hold back from trying to move this process faster. Lawmakers in Virginia have reason for their exuberance for this issue: Virginia has the highest concentration of computer science jobs in the country and with the number of open jobs legislators are under enormous pressure from our business community to act.
Steering away from a high school mandate was a practical choice on two levels. First, we are not near capacity for having enough high school teachers to cover a mandate at that level, the average high school in state would need 4-6 full time computer science teachers to cover a graduation requirement, and an example. CodeVA has trained over 400 middle and high school teachers over the past four years, and this summer will be expanding from one central training to four statewide hubs serving up to 600 teachers. While this moves the state closer towards the goal of having one computer science teacher in each of the state’s 700-plus middle and high schools, that still is enough to meet the demand an immediate high school mandate would create.
Second was the general feeling that it is OK for a student to pursue another field in high school and not want to continue with computer science.This is where measuring the impact of the current initiative becomes vital. We first must explore how exposing all students over several years to ongoing computer science instruction shifts landscape in high school and beyond.
For CodeVA the next step is to continue to work with schools and districts to incorporate computer science in daily instruction. Expanding access to professional development by establishing three new hubs across the state is an important first step. These hubs will continue to run the middle and high school training cohorts we have lead since 2014 and add the new Elementary Coaches Academy we are currently piloting. In addition, to support the K-8 mandate we will be working with teams of teachers to create classroom curriculum that reflects the new standards. Finally, CodeVA is launching a pilot of a Computer Science Roadmap project that helps districts collect the information they need to plan the infrastructure needed for implementation.
While two years ago we did not anticipate needing to build a statewide infrastructure to support the implementation of standards Virginia hopes that the lessons learned through this process can inform other states as they move to truly bring computer science to all of their students.
The Role of CS Departments in The US President’s “CS for All” Initiative: Panel from #SIGCSE 2017
There was interest in our slides from the 2017 SIGCSE Panel, “The Role of CS Departments in The US President’s “CS for All” Initiative.” They are linked above, and summarized below.
In January 2016, US President Barack Obama started an initiative to provide CS for All – with the goal that all school students should have access to computing education. Computing departments in higher education have a particularly important role to play in this initiative. It’s in our best interest to get involved, since the effort can potentially improve the quality of our incoming students. CS Departments have unique insights as subject-matter experts to inform the development of standards. We can provide leadership to inform and influence education policy. In this session, we will present a variety of ways in which departments and faculty can support CS for All and will answer audience questions about the initiative. Our goal is to provide concrete positive actions for faculty.
Barbara Ericson spoke on influencing our incoming students and using outreach to improve the number and diversity of students and to improve the number and quality of teachers.
Rick Adrion spoke on CS faculty providing subject-matter expertise to standards efforts. A key role for CS faculty is to help teachers, administrators, and public policy makers to understand what CS is.
Megean Garvin spoke on how CS faculty can provide a leadership role. Faculty have a particular privileged position to draw together diverse stakeholders to advance CS Education.
Insightful Report on the State of AP CS in California
Insightful new report from ACCESS-CA on who is taking AP CS in California and on the challenges (quoted below):
Despite the strong outlook for the technology economy in California, there are major challenges in meeting the growing demand for skilled technology workers and preparing Californians to participate in the workforce of the future:
The lack of computer science standards, courses, and teachers and the lack of alignment between computing pathways and workforce needs. Roughly 65% of high schools in California offer no computing classes and the state has yet to develop a statewide plan for computing education.
The lack of diversity in the computing education pipeline and within the technology sector, particularly given the rapidly-increasing diversity of California’s population. 60% of California’s student population is Latinx or African American, yet these students comprise just 16% of students taking AP CS A and 15% of the technology workforce
From COMPUTER SCIENCE IN CALIFORNIA’S SCHOOLS: 2016 AP CS Results and Implications
NSF Education Research Questions and Warnings for #CSforAll during #CSEdWeek
Joan Ferrini-Mundy spoke at our White House Symposium on State Implementation of CS for All (pictured above). Joan is the Assistant Director at NSF for the Education and Human Resources Directorate. She speaks for Education Research. She phrased her remarks as three research areas for the CS for All initiative, but I think that they could be reasonably interpreted as three sets of warnings. These are the things that could go wrong, that we ought to be paying attention to.
1. Graduation Requirements: Joan noted that many states are making CS “count” towards high school graduation requirements. She mentioned that we ought to consider the comments of organizations such as NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) and NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics). She asked us to think about how we resolve these tensions, and to track what are the long term effects of these “counting” choices.
People in the room may not have been aware that NSTA had just (October 17) come out with a statement, “Computer Science Should Supplement, not Supplant Science Education.”
The NCTM’s statement (March 2015) is more friendly towards computer science, it’s still voiced as a concern:
Ensuring that students complete college- and career-readiness requirements in mathematics is essential. Although knowledge of computer science is also fundamental, a computer science course should be considered as a substitute for a mathematics course graduation requirement only if the substitution does not interfere with a student’s ability to complete core readiness requirements in mathematics. For example, in states requiring four years of mathematics courses for high school graduation, such a substitution would be unlikely to adversely affect readiness.
Both the NSTA and NCTM statements are really saying that you ought to have enough science and mathematics. If you only require a couple science or math courses, then you shouldn’t swap out CS for one of those. I think it’s a reasonable position, but Joan is suggesting that we ought to be checking. How much CS, science, and mathematics are high school students getting? Is it enough to be prepared for college and career? Do we need to re-think CS counting as science or mathematics?
2. Teacher Credentialing: Teacher credentials in computer science are a mishmash. Rarely is there a specific CS credential. Most often, teachers have a credential in business or other Career and Technical Education (CTE or CATE, depending on the state), and sometimes mathematics or science. Joan asked us, “How is that working?” Does the background matter? Which works best? It’s not an obvious choice. For example, some CS Ed researchers have pointed out that CTE teachers are often better at teaching diverse audiences than science or mathematics teachers, so CTE teachers might be better for broadening participation in computing. We ought to be checking.
3. The Mix of Curricular Issues: While STEM has a bunch of frameworks and standards to deal with, we know what they are. There’s NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) and the National Research Council Framework. There’s Common Core. There are the NCTM recommendations.
In Computer Science, everything is new and just developing. We just had the K-12 CS Framework released. There are ISTE Standards, and CSTA Standards, and individual state standards like in Massachusetts. Unlike science and mathematics, CS has almost no assessments for these standards. Joan explicitly asked, “What works where?” Are our frameworks and standards good? Who’s going to develop the assessments? What’s working, and under what conditions?
I’d say Joan is being a critical friend. She wants to see CS for All succeed, but she doesn’t want that to cost achievement in other areas of STEM. She wants us to think about the quality of CS education with the same critical eye that we apply to mathematics and science education.
Research+Practice Partnerships and Finding the Sweet Spots: Notes from the ECEP and White House Summit
I wrote back in October about the summit on state implementation of the CS for All initiative which we at Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) alliance organized with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). You can see the agenda here and a press release on the two days of meetings here.
I have been meaning to write about some of the lessons I learned in those two days, but have been simply slammed this month. I did finally write about some of the incremental steps that states are taking towards CS for All in my Blog@CACM post for November. That post is about the models of teacher certification that are developing, the CSNYC school-based mandate, and New Hampshire’s micro-certifications.
In this post, I want to tell you about a couple of the RPC ideas that I found most compelling. The first part of the day at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) on the White House grounds was organized by the Research+Practice Collaboratory (RPC). I was the moderator for the first panel of the day, where Phil Bell, Nichole Pinkard, and Dan Gallagher talked about the benefits of combining research plus practice.
I was excited to hear about the amazing work that Nichole Pinkard (pictured above) is doing in Chicago, working with Brenda Wilkerson in Chicago Public Schools. Nichole is a learning scientist who has been developing innovative approaches to engaging urban youth (see her Digital Youth Network website). She has all these cool things she’s doing to make the CS for All efforts in Chicago work. She’s partnering with Chicago parks and libraries — other than schools, they’re the ones who cover the city and connect with all kids. She’s partnering with Comcast to create vans that can go to parks to create hotspots for connectivity. Because she’s a researcher working directly with schools, they can do things that researchers alone would find hard to do — like when a student shows up to a CS activity, she can email the student’s parents to tell them the next steps to make sure that they continue the activity at home.
There was a second panel on “Finding the Sweet Spot: What Problems of Practice are Ripe for Knowledge Generation?” I didn’t know Shelley Pasnik from the Center for Children and Technology, and she had an idea I really liked that connected to one of Nichole’s points. Shelley emphasizes “2Gen learning,” having students bring with them parents or even grandparents so that there are two generations of learners involved. The older generation can learn alongside the student, and keep the student focused on the activity.
I know that the RPC folks are producing a report on their activity at the summit, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about their work.
What research will you do for #CSforAll? White House call for commitments
Ruthe Farmer let me know that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is explicitly interested in getting research commitments in response to this call:
In less than two months, there will be another opportunity to celebrate, to mark progress, and to grow the coalition working to expand computer science. This Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), taking place from December 5-11, schools, community organizations, families, companies, and government agencies-including the White House and Federal agencies like NASA, the National Science Foundation, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the Department of Energy-will host events and activities to give students direct access to CS. This will include everything from Family Code Nights that engage parents and students in learning computer science together, to Hour of Code events at schools, in homes, and online worldwide, to events here at the White House highlighting making and computer science, bringing broadband internet access to all Americans, and using open data to drive innovation.
With your help, this upcoming CSEdWeek has the potential to be the largest and most successful to date and we look forward to hearing about your plans. One of the ways your organization can get involved is to commit to expand computer science in your community or nationally, with measurable, specific goals that uniquely utilize what you can do to spread opportunity.
If you have an action you want to undertake to support CS education, submit it here by November 14, 2016. We want to hear about remarkable strides being made in your community and how we can build on them!
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/10/27/call-new-csforall-actions-during-computer-science-education-week
The Research+Practice Collaboratory led the ECEP State Teams last week in framing research questions relevant to the President’s CS for All initiative. Below are some of my pictures from that effort, to prime thinking about the research questions that surround CS for All. (I have a lot more to tell about last week’s meetings, but first I have to recover and recoup time lost to planning/logistics/travel.)
ECEP and White House Symposium on State Implementation of CS for All
I was thrilled when I got this message two weeks ago:
We have been working for months now on a big meeting organized by ECEP with the Research+Practice Collaboratory and Ruthe Farmer of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The goal is to organize state and federal leaders in growing CS for All in the states. Here’s my written-for-ECEP description of the agenda (not official, not vetted by OSTP, etc.):
CS for All: State-Level Research and Action Summit
Friday
The first part of the Friday sessions at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is aimed at strengthening connections between research and practice. The NSF’s CS10K efforts and the President’s CS for All Initiative have created an unprecedented rise in the implementation of CS education efforts across the United States. Making education reform systematic and sustainable requires cross-sector efforts with shared goals and meaningful data collection that can inform practice. We need to make sure that we are building and using evidence-based knowledge about what’s happening in our CS for All efforts.
CS for all is a rare education research opportunity. The American education canon does not change often. We need to create research-practice partnerships to improve our understanding of what works and why. The Research+Practice Collaboratory (Bronwyn Bevan, Phil Bell, Bill Penuel) will be bringing in a group of learning sciences researchers (including Shuchi Grover, Nichole Pinkard, and Kylie Peppler) and practitioners to work with the ECEP state teams. The goal is to learn how research-practice partnerships can help the field identify key questions and areas for building and sustaining evidence-based practice.
The afternoon session is focused on understanding where the state’s are today. ECEP Evaluators, Sagefox, will share with state groups benchmark data. We will review data on the evaluation of the efforts to make Exploring CS, CS Principles, Bootstrap, and Code.org curricula and professional development available across the country. As a group, we will review state efforts in computer science education implementation and reform. States identify their greatest successes and identify their most pressing needs.
The evening session at OSTP is focused on making the President’s CS for All initiative work at the state level. In the United States, K-12 curriculum and policies are decided at the state-level. Obama Administration officials will help the state teams to understand the goals of the CS for All initiative. Four state teams will share their successes and efforts, which differ considerably from one another as they meet the unique challenges and objectives of their state’s education system.
Saturday
The CS for All initiative means that we all students in all schools in all districts get access to CS education. Each of our 16 states and Puerto Rico will summarize their successes and lessons learned in 3 minute madness talks. We’ll have two panels — one on negotiating state structures and processes when implementing CS for All, and one on how to make sure that we broaden participation while we aim for CS for All (to avoid being CS Just For Rich Kids). We will have a luncheon keynote from Cameron Wilson of Code.org on how they are aiming to create CS education that reaches all students.
The CS for All initiative requires us to reach all students in a system and sustainable way.
- Reaching Broader: We can see from the benchmark data where CS initiatives are focused and where there are gaps. Not all districts are implementing CS education yet. We need to develop strategies for filling in the gaps.
- Reaching Deeper: The data also show us where CS initiatives are starting but shallow. In most districts, a handful of teachers are getting short professional learning opportunities with little follow-up. Teachers need effective learning opportunities that give them the knowledge and self-confidence to make CS a sustainable topic. We need to develop strategies to make CS change deep, systemic, and sustainable.
State teams develop and share their strategies to reach broader and deeper.
Maryland school district showcases computer science education at all levels: ECEP’s role in Infrastructure
The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, funded by NSF to support broadening participation in computing through state-level efforts, is one of the more odd projects I’ve been part of. I don’t know how to frame the research aspect of what we’re doing. We’re not learning about learning or teaching, nor about computer science. We’re learning a lot about how policy makers think about CS, how education is structured in different states (and how CS is placed within that structure), and how decision-making happens around STEM education.
It’s not the kind of story that the press loves. We’re not building curriculum. We don’t work directly with students or teachers. We fund others to do summer camps and provide professional development. We help states figure out how to measure what’s going on in their state with computing education. We help organize (and sometimes fund) meetings, and we get states sharing with each other how to talk to policy makers and industry leaders.
So it’s nice when we get a blurb like the below, in a story about the terrific efforts to grow CS for All in Charles County, MD. It’s amazing how much Charles County has accomplished in providing computing education in every school. I’m pleased that ECEP’s role got recognized in what’s going on there.
Expanding Computer Education Pathways (ECEP) provided grant funding for summer camp computer programs. CCPS’s facilitators participate in their Train-the-Trainer webinars to design and plan an effective workshop, build an educator community, increase diversity in Computer Science and teach Computer Science content knowledge. ECEP also funded the Maryland Computer Science Summit in a joint effort with Maryland State Department of Education to bring over 200 attendees from every county in Maryland to share and set priorities for Computer Science education.
Google-Gallup Survey now Disaggregated by States: Fascinating and confusing reading
Google has now released the results of the Gallup surveys from last year of parents, teachers, and principals about attitudes on CS disaggregated by 11 populous US states — see state reports (and methodology explanation) here. The blog announcement about the report is here. These are fascinating to read, especially for me and my colleagues since some of these states are also ECEP states (see our recent report on activity in ECEP states). Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas are doing much better than the US average in this analysis, while Ohio and North Carolina are far behind.
These are the results of a large scale survey, not an interview, or focus groups. The advantage is that we get a lot of answers (9, 693 elementary school principals across the US). The disadvantage is that they answered these questions, without probes, follow-ups, or any “What did you mean by that?”
For example, one of the benchmark items is “CS offered > 5 years.” My first thought was that this meant that there was CS offered in the curriculum for five grades, e.g., middle school and high school. The actual question answered by principals was “How long has your school offered opportunities to learn computer science? (% greater than 5 years)” So this item is about the longevity of CS ed at these particular schools that were sampled. That’s interesting, but I’m not sure what it says about the state compared to the particular schools sampled — especially in local control states (e.g., California, Massachusetts, Nebraska) where individual districts can do anything they want.
We’re told that parents want more CS, but principals and parents mostly think that CS is computer literacy (e.g., how to use a computer). We’re told that 64% of Michigan principals say “just as/more important” to “Do you think offering opportunities to learn CS is more important, just as important, or less important to a student’s future success than required courses like math, science, history and English?” What does that mean, if they think that CS is keyboarding skills? When 11% of the principals in Illinois say that demand for CS education among parents is high, does that mean that the principals think the parents think it’s keyboarding? or real CS? Is one more valuable than the other to parents, in the opinion of principals? Maybe the principals are right, and only 11% of the parents would want CS if they knew what CS was.
Overall, recommended reading, but sometimes, it feels like reading tea leaves.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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