Video Of The Week: Computer Science Education For All

Comments (Archived):

1. It’s a setback but NY State creating K12 CS Teacher Certification is bigger news. That makes becoming a CS teacher a viable career path, or at least as viable as any other teaching career path.That’s a HUGE long game win. It’s going to take time for programs to ramp up but it means two things.One, young people who want to teach and are into CS will now have a real option and two, schools will have a way to actually integrate CS into their overall school programs.

   1. I agree – though K12 CS Education appears not to have been approved, which is hard to explain when the overall state funding for schools was set at $26.7 billion (a $1 billion increase from the 2017-18 fiscal year), the support of CS Teacher Certification would seem an important step. It will happen

      1. i think i got this wrong rich. see my updated post

         1. I see the update. I have asked for the details from our elected officials. They were pleased to get the extra $1b and they seemed to think they could do a lot with it, even if the program was not specifically mandated.

   2. I agree with Mike re teacher certification. The Board of Regents vote was huge. Thank you to legislators such as Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon for sticking with this and being a strong advocate for CS. That move really is a game changer as the graduate schools can now get fully and more confidently into the game of CS teacher preparation, and the CS teacher pipeline will become more normalized to how teachers in other subjects are prepared and supported within schools.Normalization is what is needed with funding for CS education too, and this is why the NYS budget funding is an important first step. It’s great that CS education has attracted the philanthropic support it has, and philanthropy and non-profits will have an important role going forward. But to be sustainable, CS education in public schools needs “normalization” and that means 1) licensure (now done in NYC) and 2) a steady public funding stream like other subjects, such that it’s not dependent on philanthropy year to year. From a comment I made on the original avc CS education post earlier this week: It’s also worth noting that there is only so far philanthropy can and should go. As this “market” for CS ed matures we need to move to a more typical model as found in nearly every other education subject, namely that the bulk of funding comes from state and local tax bases that go to viable for-profit curriculum providers. Right now it’s philanthropy from a small set of funders (e.g., Infosys Foundation, who is one of the larger funders) funding non-profit curriculum and products and while that’s helpful to get started, that model is not sustainable, IMO, in the long term. “normal education” is public funds being used to buy products from for-profit education companies.https://avc.com/2018/03/k12…

      1. We talk about this a lot in regards to civic technology projects. A large share of things we work on are funded philanthropically or as pilots but converting them to sustainable funding streams can be a challenge.

      2. i think it got this wrong Rob. i updated my post with the latest

         1. Thanks. I have been scouring articles for the last 1/2 hour or so and I think because it’s such a relatively small number, I hadn’t been able to find an article that mentions it. Thanks for the update. I updated my comment above — my point about normalization of funding still stands and this is a good step.

   3. i think it got it wrong. seems like the $6mm did in fact get in. i modified my post.but all of that said, you are right about teacher cert.

      1. I hate government spending, but wow does that seem really, really, low. If I went through line items in that $26B there must be at least ten times that in pure waste. But it’s a great start.

         1. And per my other comments, part of making CS education sustainable is normalization of the subject, which means funding it like we fund the other subjects in schools. We don’t leave it to principals and districts to go out hat in hand year after year to ask companies to wholly fund their English and math programs (not to imply of course they have all the resources they need). Philanthropy and non-profits have had an important incubational role in this latest push to get CS in schools, and it will continue to be very important to augment public funding, but we need CS ed to be funded like a “normal” subject, which for better or worse means public funding from the tax base. CS education is too important to let it just be a year to year game time decision by Mark Zuckerberg and friends.

            1. My comment somehow was not posted. You realize I say $6mm is a pittance, Right??NYC pays $6B in pension costs a year. Hey no guaranteed return, and other perks, fine, let’s look at salaries. (But also realize that most of us work more than 180 days a year with summer off.But my point is this.I don’t begrudge teachers, I begrudge admins.They just ponied up an extra $50mm just for admins. https://nypost.com/2018/02/…I bet the junket budget for admins is like $60mm a year.And yes, they can pay people to come in and do work instead of relying on charity.However, what I really worry about is when I see bids like $10k per computer to put it in a classroom. And when I know firsthand how somebody’s house got a ton of work done by the contractor that did it.This we have to root out. It was one of Obama’s promises that I really wanted him to complete. No raises for Government Employees Over $100k/year. No giant pensions, and pure transparency on what you do (you write it up) and what you make.Government employees say but you don’t have to do that…..yes, but I don’t pay your salary.

            2. Sure do. A pittance. One reason I was surprised it was so contentious. As context the the NYC school budget this year is $30B (http://schools.nyc.gov/Abou… this was a debate about $6M / year for the state.Regarding the $10k per computer I see the same too. In NY we have the SCA which effectively creates a 30% tax on top of prices on things like computers that must be bought through a select number of vendors at marked up prices. And remember the DOE is spending hundreds of millions to get the schools to 100Mbps per school; 150Mbps per school building? Some schools have 2,000 even 3,000 concurrent device connections sharing 100Mbps (or less in many cases for schools that have not been upgraded). Compare those numbers to the FCC’s own guides, https://www.fcc.gov/reports….

            3. Exactly what I am talking about.When one of my companies was bought, corporate came in and said you need to buy this super, super, expensive router that isolates your public Wifi and it only costs $1,000 a month to get supported from an outsourcer.”Well we just use a completely separate provider and the physical wires never cross” It costs us $65 a month. Ummm but it is our corporate standard. How has that worked for you??? (always down and people would go to Starbucks to get access) How is that different than Starbucks other than we have a password we constantly change and you have to give your MAC address just to access a totally different provider??? Ummm Purple.I bet the standard is you buy a superfast managed gigabit non blocking switch to connect to 100Mbs, and you would never use SSD Hard Drives because they are not in the standard.

         2. Not only is it low but there is no way to even find out exactly what the money will be spent on. Specifically not generally (as stated). Trips to figure out ‘how others do this’? Consultants? Lawyers? (yep you need them for this).And in a true example of ‘can always find something to prove a point’ from what I see Arkansas has $2.5m for the same thing (per my comment whatever ‘thing’ is).Dedicated funding for K-12 CS education for the 2016 or 2017 fiscal year. Nine states have met this goal. Arkansas and Idaho lead on that, with $2.5 millionhttps://thejournal.com/arti…Arkansas has 3 million people. NYS has 20 million people. Idaho? Only 1.7 million. (Brooklyn has 2.6 million..)But even given that disparity (after all nobody says Arkansas/Idaho is ‘right’ in their number) I am sure much of this will also be spent on figuring out exactly how to spend the money.A step in the right direction? Of course. But you have to wonder exactly how the money will be spent.

            1. I guess it all depends on what one considers overhead and what is considered value creating. Is a “consultant” coming to a school to do a mid year seminar on CS education best practices value creating or overhead/waste? Is development of the best practices value creating or overhead/waste? Is administering the grant used to fund the development of the best practice value creating or overhead/water?A few years back I was the founding ED for a non-profit called TeachCS which as since ceased to exist (long story — the work has largely been rolled into a very similar effort that DonorsChoose is now doing). TeachCS raised money from donors such as Google, Tata, and Microsoft to fund in-service teachers’ individual summer professional development to go get trained in one of 5 NSF funded CS curricula such as BJC or Bootstrap.A big part of the teacher grant was a stipend to allow teachers to pay for their travel to the training sites, hotel/food, and/or child care.This was a hard sell to new potential funders. They told me they had a hard time rationalizing why they should have to pay travel costs or child care so teachers can be trained to teach computer science. And yet many, including key national leaders in the CS ed movement, know (correctly) these stipends were critical.And what’s the alternative? Would those potential funders have funded the reverse – trainers coming out to schools to train the teachers — that was also a tough sell. And without child care PD would be for only those teachers who did not have kids and/or were more affluent and could pay for child care during the summer out of pocket — and that correlates to teachers who tend to work in more affluent communities.My point is that stuff costs money. I worry too that CS funding, including and especially philanthropy, will go too much to bureaucracy, consultants, etc. But stuff costs money.

            2. I was talking more about funding studies (and consultants) to figure out how to implement ‘study first, cut second’. And not saying that wasn’t necessary just curious the money spent on this. What is the vig?But to your points as well:or child care so teachers can be trained to teach computer scienceI am not in a position to know what companies pay for when their employees have to travel on business. But I don’t think it’s automatic that a company (or school or non-profit) should have to pay for ‘child care’ if an employee travels on business unless it is for an emergent reason. Doesn’t matter if they are school teachers or chemists. Otherwise it falls into the category of ‘figure it out or get someone to help you out’. [1] Otherwise there will be gaming and there will be abuse.trainers coming out to schools to train the teachers — that was also a tough sellSeems way more cost effective to bring out 1 trainer with expenses than to send multiple people out. Of course if you are talking about 1 person travel out vs. 1 person travel in sure that makes sense and should in theory be cheaper. But I still say child care is ‘figure it out’.Does AVC pay for child care if employees or partners have to travel? Or is it ‘figure it out’?Now with respect to travel costs it depends on whether there will be a pay increase or some other benefit to the teachers. If they make more money then maybe not. Or maybe partial. Something like that. This is one of those things that is not clear cut. And it’s an easy way to waste money. When you pay for something that you don’t have to pay for.and that correlates to teachers who tend to work in more affluent communities.Sure that is unfortunate but the truth is the taxes in those ‘affluent communities’ are through the roof. And of course while everyone would like things to be equal they simply aren’t going to be.[1] I once offered to pay for painters for an employee who said they couldn’t work finishing a project because they had to paint their house because they were moving (for another job). So I said ‘I will pay for that your time is more valuable than a painters and we can get someone to do that and you can do the work that I need’. But that was because the situation was special (and I am the chief of police (JAWS reference)) and can do what I want). Not a policy but a practical solution.

            3. Lots I’d like to say as the nephew of three public schools teachers and the son of 30 year special education teacher, but my overall point is that it’s one thing, from behind a screen name that masks your real life identity no less, to “wonder exactly how the money will be spent” and quite another to actually invest the time and effort to raise money for computer science education, do the advocacy, curriculum development, etc. work to expand CS education, or wholly commit and be a K-12 CS education teach in a public school, especially in a Title I school.As mentioned in a comment above (https://avc.com/2018/03/vid…, you and @sigmaalgebra:disqus appear by your comments today and on previous posts about this topic to know better than the rest of us, including and especially public school teachers and administrators, how to get this all done. So maybe you two can save us all some time and money cut to the chase. Go put together the plan to get CS into our schools, fundraise for it, lead it, and execute.

            4. Several people on this blog (including Fred, William, Phil, JLM. Falicon, Pointsandfigures and more) know exactly who I am. And what about JLM, Salt Shaker, Pointsandfigures, Kid Mercury, Falicon and so on. Don’t have time to check but at least some of those ‘are hiding behind a screen name that masks your real life identity’. Oh also Jason Wright.And I 100% stand behind my comment about wanting to know how the money is spent. Out of curiosity. Because it’s not my money. And honestly why assume I even care to support this at all? Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’d rather have them teaching the trades in high school? Am I allowed to not think the same way as everyone else (here). Something wrong with that? Of course not.It’s Fred’s blog. And if he doesn’t want me to question anything or make the type of comments that I make then he can tell me not to do so and I will respect that.Lastly where does making a comment or criticism indicate or imply that “I know better than the rest of us”.

            5. It’s Fred’s blog and Fred’s rules. The discourse here is the best of any forum I’ve seen on the internet, today included.I like nearly all of the rules here, including the recent adjustments after the ICO spamming, but I do dislike the asymmetry that screen names (anonymity) creates (especially on forums like Twitter, which has increasingly become intolerably toxic by bots and trolls who hide behind anonymity). I’ve noted my discomfort with the anonymity of screen names before here.With a Google search you can figure out where I work now, where I’ve worked before, that I’ve been an elected member of one of the city’s 32 school boards (a CEC), and probably my political leanings too (including that I’m also an elected member of the King’s County Democratic Committee). But all I can figure out about you is that you probably like running based on your photo.And when you start to go after teachers, which it sounds to me at least from your comments today you’re starting to do, that asymmetry – I’m identified, while you stay anonymous to all but those to whom you choose to reveal yourself – starts to sting a bit. Someone coming to the discussion, or maybe the blog for the first time, can know almost anything they’d like about me, and yet nothing about you. I can’t find out if you’re a public school parent, if you work someplace that has a relationship with schools or districts, etc. There is context about me for my comments, but none for you and your comments. Again, it’s asymmetric and I think it keeps good discourse here from being great.I want to know how the money is being spent too. As I said “I worry too that CS funding, including and especially philanthropy, will go too much to bureaucracy, consultants, etc.”Back to the child care point — does it help clarify my point to mention that the potential funders that did not want to pay for teacher stipends that might be used by teachers for childcare so those teachers could get CS education PD themselves supply childcare and many other lavish benefits for their own employees?

            6. Lest my comments on child care are misinterpreted (which they will be no matter what I say) I was watching something on tv news which talked about a teacher that felt they were underpaid (think it was those Arizona teachers striking). And the news commentary was ‘poor them they can’t afford their family and have to work 3 jobs because their teaching job doesn’t pay enough!!’. The news actually said that. But then they also mentioned that the man (not sure if he was married or not and what his wife did) had 5 children. Well I didn’t have 5 children for multiple reasons. And one reason was that 5 kids cost a great deal of money and more than 2 kids or 1 kid or even 3 kids (and that assumes all are healthy). So please do not whine if you decide to have 5 kids and then make the rest of us pay for what benefits you. Whether the teachers are underpaid is an entirely separate issue. But mentioning 5 kids detracts from the argument.

            7. If you look at the value of a pension, I’d say it makes a big difference.

            8. Both my current wife’s parents are retired teachers and are living off that pension (in NY Metro). Right now they are on a long 3 week trip to China. [1] They aren’t that ‘old’ either. Her father retired when he was 58 for health reasons. Taught in Harlem and got extra pay for doing that. Her mother retired when she was 67 but that’s because she didn’t start teaching until her 30’s. The girl that I dated before I got married well, both of her parents were also teachers (in NYC). I remember them telling me about the “$1m dollar TDA” which I think means ‘teachers deferred annuity’. They are both retired as well. Also remember very distinctly that the mother would joke about how her and her cohorts would slack off and show movies in their last year or two (union can’t get fired). They would say ‘Randi has our back’ (Randi Weingarten).[1] This is one of those non-relevant commentaries that I will add which would bother me if I heard it on the news since it implies that they are living large.

            9. I’d observe that 1) you’re cherry picking a single story about a single family to further you point and 2) if you’d like to take the side that teachers are paid too much or even enough, have at it.In Oklahoma some districts are down to 4 days a week (https://www.economist.com/n… for want of sufficient funding. And this article from CNN today (https://www.cnn.com/2018/03… profiles a number of public school teachers that are working multiple jobs and struggling economically.In my opinion we (i.e., the citizens of the United States; I think you don’t like it when I say “we” so I’m specifying) won’t “make America great again” by doing things like cutting school weeks down to 4 days a week. But I suspect that instead of providing a great education for all our kids, we will continue down the path of lowering taxes, all the while avoiding hard discussions about other large line items on federal (defense, entitlements, healthcare) and state budgets (entitlements, healthcare), and instead be content quibbling amongst ourselves about how much of $6M a year might be waste and passing judgements on how many kids teachers choose to have.

            10. I’d observe that 1) you’re cherry picking a single story about a single family to further you pointI am not cherry picking a story at all. In fact I am making fun of the tv news. I said at the end of my comment. And actually saying anything like that (tv news) or even close to try and prove a point is manipulative. We don’t know how they spend their money or anything. Just ‘has to work 3 jobs’. It’s a lazy tear jerker. Remember I said this at the end:Whether the teachers are underpaid is an entirely separate issue. But mentioning 5 kids detracts from the argument.By the way the general argument is typically (and I am not the only one on this blog to say it) boils down to ‘don’t make me pay for your poor life choices’. Not that I want to pay for your bad luck either but I certainly don’t want to pay for anyone’s lack of the consequences of their actions.On the other hand as I have noted to Phil Sugar my ‘paradox of the value of other’s stupidity’ (or whatever I called it) says that if everyone thought like me and was me I wouldn’t be able to earn a living as easily because I would have more competition.

            11. You realize the teachers didn’t take a pay cut right? Their pay still sucks, but again, put in pension benefits. Same for Army, same for police, worst for admins. Is getting a $2mm tax free lump sum after working for 20 years worth it? Yup, your pay sucks, no different than bootstrapped entrepreneurs, but it’s just opposite. Everybody looks at the payday, not the salary. Just days longer, and less bussing. Ever lived in Oklahoma? I have. Outskirts of Tulsa when my Dad worked for DX which was bought by Sunoco.Again, my Mom was a lifelong teacher. The vast majority do God’s work. They put in extra hours, they work with struggling kids, they try and do everything they can including taking money out of their pocket for their kids.Not sure on your age, but look at houses and lifestyles from just the 1970’s much less the 1950’s. Yes, if you want to keep up with the Joneses you don’t get paid enough money but that is a choice. If you want to live in Oklahoma. Different.You know why they play 6 and 8 man Football instead of 11 out there???But people need to show both sides which nobody ever does. I don’t agree but I see the vacuum chamber and think???Yes your wife would never live in Oklahoma. Go look up Zillow prices there. Life is different.

   4. I didn’t realize this. My Mom was a math teacher but she ended up teaching three compsci courses and two calculus. (For reference I graduated from HS in 1985)

      1. I graduated high school in ’84, started teaching in the early 90s – been out of license my whole career. The Bd of Regents voted it in a couple of weeks ago and it went into effect last Wednesday.

         1. Well about time.

2. Congestion pricing? What a ruse. The new state budget also requires a $2.75 surcharge applied to any Uber ride in Manhattan below 96th Street ($2.50 on yellow cabs). The plain fact is the MTA has a huge budget shortfall cause folks aren’t riding the broke, mismanaged subway system as much, which is desperately in need of capital. So to drive subway usage, the state has stacked the deck by creating a disincentive for using Uber and yellow cabs. Hope this is challenged in court cause it doesn’t seem right. Classic gov’t overreach.

   1. i wonder what the average (mean and/ or median) journey distance is in Manhattan?

      1. Perhaps better to look at avg. fare than avg. distance. I bet the avg fare, just a guess, is around $12, so the proposed surcharges are significant. Squeezing blood from a stone. Another example of increasing cost of living in NYC.

         1. i wonder how Manhattan stacks up on a quality of life index? seems like a place only the well off can be happy living in/ on.

            1. Expensive, stressful and fun. Gotta take the good w/ the bad. Not sure it’s that much diff than living in any major world city today, though one prob gets a bit less for the money in nyc, particularly on the housing front.

   2. New York could fix all of that if they raised property taxes. The amount of property tax that many pay in NYC compared to what is paid elsewhere is extremely low. I’ve seen cases where a residence in NYC is paying 1/8th of what I pay in my state for a property of equivalent value. Of course that is not going to happen. (Nor does it matter to me I don’t ride the subway or live there.) Where I live the rate is between 3 and 4% per year of property value (let’s say). I think mine is something like 3.7%. And that is for both residential and commercial properties.

      1. NYers are already taxed to death. Triple tax—fed, state and local income tax, plus very high sales tax. They could raise taxes on high end incomes, which, in essence, you’d somewhat accomplish by increasing RE taxes (assuming there’s a correlation between income and ownership), but that would depress home ownership opportunities. (Also, remember w/ Trump’s tax plan many NYers are now getting screwed w/ prop tax deduction caps.) WA has no state/local income tax (but high sales and RE taxes). The diff between what I pay (and paid) in overall taxes between WA and NY at comparable income levels is sizable. The formula isn’t sustainable in WA (they need other sources of rev.), but in the interim they keep raising RE taxes.

3. Well de Blasio makes his proposal, basic, first computer facility, sound both good and reasonable.So, have some after school sessions for a month or a one semester course in, say, the seventh grade?Call it computer literacy or some such. Just why he is so eager to call the program “computer science” is a bit strange.Maybe there is not much need: I have a nephew, now 7, who has been big on computer games since he was 5.K-12 doesn’t need to teach the kids how to ride bicycles, drive cars, bake pizza, have hands on opposite sex anatomy lab lessons in the back seat of an old car, use the usual kitchen appliances, mow grass, sew on buttons, etc. either.Gee, schools have clubs, the Chess Club, the Math Club. So, maybe there should be a Computer Club.It appears that somewhere we should be more clear on just what is being proposed for computing in K-12.So, right, at home some kids have an overclocked game computer with some high end NVIDIA board and copies of “Call of Duty”, etc. video games, spend hours each week playing, so get really good at basic computer usage while some other kids hardly have even a keyboard.It begins to look like to a significant extent the proposal is a common “liberal” one to level the playing field of opportunity by having K-12 to do enough essentially in parenting so that kids with poor parenting at home can keep up with kids with good parenting at home. Having K-12 replace the home would be a challenging goal.Broadly it looks like there are lots of agenda items with so far most of them hidden and, thus, not discussed.

   1. The name, “Computer Science for All” was created during the Bloomberg administration. Our host probably had more of hand it that naming than the current Mayor did. It’s good that the current Mayor has chosen to continue the support of CSForAll — that wasn’t a foregone conclusion when Bloomberg left and De Blasio came in. Our host deserves credit for his grit and tenacity in helping make sure that happened.Overall, based on your collective comments and critiques of what’s being done and how money is being used it seems like you and @le_on_avc:disqus have the computer science/literacy thing all figured out. Speaking for myself, but I’m guessing our host and others on this board like @zamansky:disqus would agree, we each got into the cause of expanding computer science in schools knowing it would hard to both raise money and execute on it, only to find out it was much much harder than we ever expected. Almost everyone involved is doing this work as a labor of love as a volunteer or by working for less than market. We’d all like to have this work done, confident that the nations’ kids are finally getting the computer science education I think nearly everyone on this board agrees they need and deserve. So – and I mean this seriously – maybe you two can get together and save us all a lot of time and hard work and share with us your grand plan for raising the money and getting the work done.

      1. My main point was just to ask what the heck really IS the work to be done?What are the needs, the goals, not being met now?E.g., it appears that lots of kids do just fine playing high end video games and using smartphones. Is that enough of computer literacy for K-12?If not, then what more? Learn computer hardware basics, e.g., processor cores, chip sets with northbridge and southbridge, main memory DDR4 DIMMs with ECC, the SATA and USB interfaces, etc.? Then register sets, instruction sets, addressing, I/O instructions and device drivers, memory protection, cache memory, ring security, virtual memory, virtual machine, Ethernet and its addressing, switches, routers, DNS, authentication, TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript? Assembler, C, C++, C#, Python, .NET? Data representation, data types, data structures, algorithms, computational time complexity, concurrency, data base? Server farm design and system management? Software project management?On and on? How much of such stuff?What is worth teaching, e.g., will still be good to know in, say, 10 years?There are two extremes clearly visible: (A) Conclude that the kids are learning enough already from their video games, smartphones, etc. so that K-12 doesn’t need to do anything. (B) Charge into academic computer science through, say, the junior year of a college computer science major?For (B), get vector calculus and Fourier theory so that can do physics through Maxwell’s equations so that can understand wireless communications?What the heck are we talking about here?One could build an argument that anything from (A) to (B) would be the right stuff. Uh, in comparison, at times there have been vocational high schools where the kids get to work with real equipment, for wood working, metal working, auto shop, etc. Well, then, could have a high school vocational education computer track.Theorem: Ah, for n x n real symmetric matrix A, eigenvectors with distinct eigenvalues are orthogonal.Proof: Okay, suppose for n x 1 x and y and real s and t we have that Ax = sx and Ay = ty with s and t distinct. Since A is symmetric, A^T = A. Then write(s – t)x^Ty = s(x^Ty) – t(x^Ty) = (sx)^Ty – x^T(ty) = (Ax)^Ty – x^TAy = x^TA^Ty – x^TAy = x^TAy – x^TAy = 0So, we have(s – t)x^Ty = 0Since s and t are distinct, it follows that x^Ty = 0. Done.I just thought of, reinvented, rediscovered, remembered this this morning!Ah, teach the kids that, right? Trust me: It’s more important than C!

4. As a tech leader who has hired my share of software folks over my career, I can tell you that cramming CS into kids’ heads early isn’t going to create the best coders. By far the most effective and innovative developers I have hired have flourished in the arts and humanities before moving to CS.They think of the technology as a set of tools to solve human problems. They intuitively understand the linkages between experiences and technical designs. This doesn’t happen by just learning rudimentary programming skills early. It happens by learning rudimentary creativity early – problem solving is not as much logic as it is imagining the solved state.While I am a fan of CS in school, we need to keep the arts and humanities in our schools, and they are under threat to accommodate higher STEM test scores.This is a false choice.