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Submission + - Univ. of WA: Opponents of K-12 CS Bill "Same People Who Don't Like Puppies"

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Led by Washington State income tax killer Steve Ballmer, dozens of tech, education & nonprofit execs urged passage of a WA computer science education bill, calling for millions in state spending to help prepare K-12 kids for tech jobs. In a signed letter and full-page Seattle Times ad lobbying lawmakers to pass House Bill 1813, representatives from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and tech-bankrolled Code.org suggested WA State ante up $1 million-a-year for starters, saying "Let's give a united answer to the parent who asks, 'Why doesn’t my child’s school teach computer science?'" Hey, why not tell them it's because Ballmer dodged a possible $180M in state taxes on a planned $2B Microsoft stock sale that could have been used for CS education instead of enriching Donald Sterling! By the way, the University of Washington — on whose behalf representatives of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Code.org (including some WA state income tax opponents) coincidentally recently penned a letter pressuring WA lawmakers to fund a new $110M CS building — notes that HB 1813 went on to pass the WA House 91-7. "We don’t know who the 7 were," quipped the UW, "but it’s presumably the same folks who don’t like puppies." No word if that includes the WA State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who in public testimony on HB 1813 pushed back on Microsoft and Code.org's call for girls-first CS education, challenging advocates of "computer science for all" to instead put their tax money where their mouths are and support full funding of, well, statewide K-12 CS for ALL, if it's indeed all that important.

Submission + - Go R, Young Man

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Learning to code has become a mainstream fascination," writes Brian Liou in Why are YOU learning to code?, "but all the evangelization has been misleading. The problem in our Chris-Bosh-codes-so-should-you society is that people learn to code without first asking "for what purpose do you want to use code?" What in your day-to-day work could you actually automate using code? Let’s face it, your odds of creating the next hot iPhone app aren’t great, but the spreadsheets you look at everyday or the strategic business decisions you or your company makes? Coding can help you with those. Coding to better understand data would help everyone." Leada co-founder Liou's advice? "So to all non-technical professionals looking to get technical: If you want to become a software engineer, by all means learn Ruby or go through the JavaScript tutorials on Codecademy. But if you’re simply a business professional looking to gain an edge on your peers, trust me, you are much better off learning R." So, did Mark Zuckerberg steer 100 million K-12 coder wannabes down the wrong path with the JavaScript and Ruby preaching?

Submission + - Making CS Education an Issue Like Climate Change: Mission Accomplished?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Code is the New Literacy, declared tech-backed Code.org in a star-studded video two years ago as it teamed with politicians, educators, billionaires, tech giants, and the NSF to make CS education "an issue like climate change". And as the billionaire-bankrolled nonprofit celebrates its second birthday, it would appear that the mission's been accomplished. Last December saw K-12 educators in the U.S. and Russia clamor to make sure their kids get with the program(ming). Heck, Arkansas went so far as to declare a high school CS education state of emergency, New York City has tapped Code.org, the NSF, Google, and Microsoft to tag-team-teach schoolkids CS before, during, and after school, and AmeriCorps VISTA Members will soon be fighting the war on poverty using Google's CS First Curriculum. Hey, Harold Hill and Lyle Lanley could only dream of such success!

Submission + - Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Comment Same Crew Anteed Up Money to Defeat WA Income Tax (Score 4, Informative) 102

by theodp (#49152049) Attached to: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook Press WA For $40M For New UW CS Building

Public Disclosure Commission records show that five of those who signed the letter calling for increased WA State spending - Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Director Brad Smith, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, Madrona VC and Amazon.com Director Tom Alberg, Ignition Partners VC Brad Silverberg, Trilogy VC John Stanton - contributed money in 2010 to defeat I-1098, an initiative for a WA state income tax. Other contributors to Defeat 1098 included Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon exec and Code.org Director Jeff Wilke, Microsoft Corporation, and other Microsoft execs, including then-CEO Steve Ballmer. After I-1098 went down in flames, Ballmer announced plans to sell $2B of Microsoft stock that might have been subject to as much as $180 million in state taxes under the quashed proposal.

Submission + - Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook Press WA for $40M for New UW CS Building

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Nice computer industry you got there. Hate to see something bad happen to it." That's the gist of a letter sent by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Code.org, and other tech giants earlier this week asking the WA State Legislature to approve $40M in capital spending to help fund a new $110M University of Washington computer science building ($70M will be raised privately). "As representatives of companies and businesses that rely on a ready supply of high quality computer science graduates," wrote the letter's 23 signatories, "we believe it is critical for the State to invest in this sector in a way that ensures its vibrancy and growth. Our vision is for Washington to continue to lead the way in technology and computer science, but we must keep pace with the vast demand." The UW Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering profusely thanked tech leaders for pressing for a new building, which UW explained "will accommodate a doubling of our enrollment." Coincidentally, the corporate full-press came not long after the ACM Education Council Diversity Taskforce laid out plans "to get companies to press universities to use more resources to create more seats in CS classes" to address what it called "the desperate gap between the rising demand for CS education and the too-few seats available." Interestingly, had Microsoft, Amazon, and Code.org execs not quashed a proposed WA State income tax in 2010, the tax on Steve Ballmer's planned $2B Microsoft stock sale alone might have raised $180 million. Hey, better that Ballmer's tax savings further enrich Donald Sterling, right?

Submission + - AmeriCorps VISTA to Fight Poverty with Google's CS First Curriculum

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Conceived by President John F. Kennedy, VISTA has been on the front lines in the fight against poverty in America for 50 years. On Monday, Google announced it will be training newly-hired AmeriCorps VISTA Members to help Boys & Girls Clubs in six cities facilitate Google's CS First curriculum. "Working together," explained Google of its Code Corps partnership with Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Corporation for National and Community Service, "we can empower more young people with the technical know-how they need to succeed in today’s society and economy." The news comes the week after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Google will roll out after-school CS First coding classes for 100K NYC school kids, part of De Blasio's $10 million Tech Talent Pipeline initiative.

Submission + - U.S. K-12 Learn-to-Code Initiative Prompted Russia to Launch "Code War"

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Overlooked in all the excitement over President Obama 'learning to code' as he kicked off Computer Science Education Week last December was how enthusiastically Russia embraced the U.S. K-12 learn-to-code initiative that's been promoted and bankrolled by the tech industry and its leaders. Late last week, Code.org revealed that "7.1 million Russian students learned an #HourOfCode in December!"" compared to the 10.6 million U.S. participants, adding that the U.S. barely accounted for half of all participation during CS Education Week. So, how did a "partner campaign" of this magnitude involving Microsoft escape notice? "Our Russian partners managed a separate site (coderussia.ru)," Code.org explained in response to a question about inconsistent site stats, "because the ministry of education got involved and didn’t want to rely on a US org. Participation [in the Russia Hour of Code] was tracked here and added to our count after the week." Interestingly, Code.org told the House and the Senate in 2014 that "learning computer science is this generation’s Sputnik moment" as it argued for "comprehensive immigration reform efforts that tie H-1B visa fees to a new STEM education fund...to support the teaching and learning of more computer science in K-12 schools." So, is the K-12 "Code War" the new Cold War?

Comment Pearson: No profit left behind (Score 4, Interesting) 139

by theodp (#49102377) Attached to: L.A. School Superintendent Folds on Laptops-For-Kids Program

No profit left behind: Across the country, Pearson sold the Los Angeles Unified School District an online curriculum that it described as revolutionary - but that had not yet been completed, much less tested across a large district, before the LAUSD agreed to spend an estimated $135 million on it. Teachers dislike the Pearson lessons and rarely use them, an independent evaluation found.

Submission + - Girls Rule, Boys Not So Much in NYC Plan for High School CS Education 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: While Washington State educators bucked the don't-worry-about-boys approach to high school CS education espoused by Microsoft, Google, and others, the New York City Dept. of Education appear to have no such qualms. According to posted program requirements, principals of NYC Schools seeking a share of the $5.4 million NSF grant for Bringing a Rigorous Computer Science Principles Course to the Largest School System in the United States must "implement a recruitment plan with a focus on enrolling female and underrepresented students into the course." According to a White House fact sheet, "the course will draw more students into the discipline by focusing on foundational computing skills and the creative aspects of computing." In an interview last week, President Obama said that he has encouraged his two daughters to learn to code, although they haven’t taken to it the way he’d like. "Part of the problem," the President added, "is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way."

Submission + - Be True to Your Online School: Bill Gates on Educating the World

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: During February, Bill Gates is playing Perry White at The Verge, expounding on the big bets the Gates Foundation is making to improve the world over the next 15 years. One of those bets is that online classrooms can help the world catch up. Gates' vision of universal online education extends to those who struggle with basic literacy and currently lack online access, far beyond the reach of MOOCs like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, which have enjoyed their greatest success with higher-level courses aimed at the middle class. "Gates’ vision — a wave of smartphones that can act as ubiquitous, cheap computers — is central to solving this problem," explains The Verge's Adi Robertson. "And unfortunately, we’re not there yet." But eventually, Gates is betting that a world-class education will only be a few taps away for anyone in the world. And that's when things get really interesting. "Before a child even starts primary school," Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their Foundation's 2015 letter, "she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start. Software will be able to see when she's having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace. She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way. If she is learning a language, she'll be able to speak out loud and the software will give her feedback on her pronunciation." By the way, since Bill thinks interactive problem sets are a relatively new development, he might want to chat with ex-Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie about his experiences with PLATO in the '70s, a decade that saw PLATO teaching reading to young children, elementary math to 4th-6th graders, and computer science to college students. Hate to see the world's richest man reinvent the wheel!

Submission + - Should We Really Try to Teach Everyone to Code?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As tech-bankrolled Code.org boasts that its K-12 Hour of Code campaign has eclipsed 100 million hours (whatever that means), Gottfried Sehringer asks Should We Really Try to Teach Everyone to Code? Sehringer writes, "While everyone today needs to be an app developer, is learning to code really the answer? Henry Ford said that, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” I view everyone learning to code as app development’s version of a faster horse. What we all really want — and need — is a car. The industry is falling back on code because for most people, it’s the only thing they know. If you want to build an application, you have to code it. And if you want to build more apps, then you have to teach more people how to code, right? Instead, shouldn’t we be asking whether coding is really the best way to build apps in the first place? Sure, code will always have a place in the world, but is it the language for the masses? Is it what we should be teaching everyone, including our kids?" President Obama thinks so, telling Re/code at Friday's Cyber Security Summit that 'everybody's got to learn to code early'. But until domestic girls (including his daughters) and underrepresented groups get with the program(ming), the President explained he's pushing tech immigration reform hard and using executive action to help address tech's "urgent need" for global talent. Probably just a coincidence, but the same global-talent-until-US-kids-are-CS-savvy talking points can be found in Microsoft's National Talent Strategy and Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC charter!

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