Bill Introduced To Replace West Virginia's New CS Course Graduation Requirement With Computer Literacy Proficiency 51
theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI education alongside traditional CS, teaming up with tech CEOs and leaders last year to launch a national campaign to mandate CS and AI courses as graduation requirements.
"It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS.
The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy, abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations.
"It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS.
The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy, abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations.
Just as well. (Score:3, Insightful)
AI is going to take all the CS jobs anyway. Might as well bring back vocational programs in coal mining, considering all the energy these AI data centers will need.
Re: Just as well. (Score:1)
Or most people simply don't have a need for computer science, even if their job is sitting at a computer all day, even if they might occasionally write an excel script. Plain old mathematics, which is already algorithmic starting with algebra, will serve most people better than computer science will.
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My son is doing CS, and first two years are very pure math heavy.
Re: Just as well. (Score:2)
I can't either, but due to low vision, not math.
Converting coal into bacon jesus memes (Score:2)
This is the future I always wanted.
West Virginia (Score:3)
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Well what should states do as far as secondary ed?
I think we can all agree that ensuring all graduates can in fact read well, posses some number sense in the form of statistics, be able to do common algebra, and perhaps basic differential calculus, and know some things about the natural sciences.
Most states are failing pretty hard at that and our education-industrial-complex finds all manor of excuses ranging from more-inflation-adjusted-spending-per-pupil than at any point in history just isn't enough, to
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It should be incorporated into the curriculum based on scientific analysis that carefully evaluates the entire curriculum, not because OpenAI is now the hottest company in The Beltway.
Re:West Virginia (Score:5, Insightful)
As a child you have no idea what you want to do with your life. The goal of high school should be both to educate in critical areas (reading, math, social studies, financial literacy, health, etc) but also to expose students to the broadest amount of trades possible. I think students should spend time writing code as much as they should spend time disecting an animal, mixing a chemical, or welding. Only through doing can we learn what our passion is.
If a student never experiences something how can they decide to do it as a career?
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It's West Virginia. Dissect an animal? That's what hunting season is for.
Some of us didn't get taken hunting even though we had a parent who hunted. We shouldn't be penalized for having shitty parents.
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Education should be more generic at the primary level, but needs to become more specific at the secondary level or beyond. If one wants to go into literature, there is no reason to torture one w/ learning complex math, trigonometry or calculus. If one wants to go on to make computers, there is no reason one should be forced to read Milton or Tolstoy or Dumas. If one wants to go into medicine, there is no reason to make one study world history and current affairs. And so on
From Secondary school, start
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I think we can all agree that ensuring all graduates can in fact read well, posses some number sense in the form of statistics, be able to do common algebra, and perhaps basic differential calculus, and know some things about the natural sciences.
I've never seen blue collar need to do calculus or statistics. Some basic algebra, geometry, and trig on the other hand... I just used all three designing my front porch.
However, I still think secondary ed should be attempting to graduate students more than pure liberal arts backgrounds, they should send people out the door with some immediately employable skills, right?
Whatever happened to shop class? We had woodworking one semester and metal another. That's were I learned to weld. And auto repair although I didn't get to take that one. Didn't need too lol
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West Virginia needs to stop doing whatever the hypest corporation tells it to do.
Corporation? Our own government the last 5 years or so took the position that every kid should learn to code, because there was no future in things like, oh, honest manual work. AI has fucked the assumptions of everyone from the halls of Congress all the way to Silicon Valley.
I'm fine with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everybody needs to know how to program, and those people who were being forced into taking a CS class were likely never going to be all that good at it.
If anything, they were likely creating the next generation of managers who think that they understand IT because they took one college course in it. They know just enough to have dangerous assumptions, but not enough knowledge to be genuinely useful.
Learing by Example. (Score:2)
Not everybody needs to know how to program, and those people who were being forced into taking a CS class were likely never going to be all that good at it.
If anything, they were likely creating the next generation of managers who think that they understand IT because they took one college course in it. They know just enough to have dangerous assumptions, but not enough knowledge to be genuinely useful.
(Reality) "You know, not everyone can be a manager."
(College Campus) "You know, we call them administrators here."
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s/IT/Economics/
They know just enough to have dangerous assumptions, but not enough knowledge to be genuinely useful.
This is true of most disciplines where a student never went beyond a college freshman or sophomore level class.
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Not everybody needs to know how to do either chemistry or physics either and yet we still require chemistry and physics classes.
Why are they wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
> "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those."
They are probably correct. The reality is that trying to make "coding" a forced part of graduation for 100% of students, to me, seems very extreme. Especially when the majority of them will actually never code afterwards. And also especially in an AI era where a lot of basic coding needs will evaporate. Is it not more reasonable to broaden the goal to overall computer literacy, rather than focusing on coding?
Personally, I think the things most lacking in high school curriculum are probably logic, reason, debate, and critical thinking. Those aren't necessarily going to be met by "coding" classes or any other narrow class. And not really by general "computer literacy" either (although I think that is certainly important).
And right after that are general life skills that everyone should need, especially financial responsibility and how to handle/manage money (budgeting, credit, debt, savings, checking accounts, investments, compound interest, retirement, taxes, mortgages). I leaned most of that from my parents and from exposure, but it seems parental teaching of such stuff (and other stuff) must be at an all-time low.
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I think most parents fail to teach the finer details of everyday life: Money and sex and law are the obvious ones. I met many teens who left home barely able to cook and clean. Their views on crime/policing, politics and religion was usually a copy of the
Literacy coding anyway in this context (Score:3)
I would argue that this is a better choice. People need to know basics of things, like backups, personal security, 2FA, dealing with the ever growing onslaught of scams, phishing attempts, and many other things. A CS course provides far less value than a basic user education course.
Let CS be a thing, but first teach safeguards and how not to get obliterated by a criminal org first.
Will cover important fundamentals? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. What is encryption? How to protect yourself using it.
2. How to verify identity online, using technology such as PGP.
3. How to read and understand software licensing and privacy policies.
4. How to understand unsafe data handling practices.
5. Why open standards matter. For instance, why you should use ODF instead of DOCX.
6. How to pick privacy and digital liberty protecting software.
7. The dangers of subscription first licensing.
8. Backups, why, how, and why they're actually important.
9. Domain separation, how to separate Work, Personal, Temp and other activities.
10. OS selection. Yes, I really want kids to know you have to consider the OS you run.
11. Safe browsing, which goes into all user agent masking, IP masking, profiles, containers and all that lovely stuff.
12. The importance of system cleanup, why you need to clear browsers every day, run tools like BleachBit, etc...
So on, these are basic topics a "computer literacy proficiency" program would have to cover, among others.
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Cheers to freedom beers :)
Are those French?
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Imagine if a company demanded you install a camera in your bedroom, that you couldn't turn off, cover, or obscure.
You have no access to the feed from the camera, when it's on, or what it captures. You have no control over what happens to the video, who it's shared with, and how it's analyzed. Furthermore, you have to take on pure faith the good intentions of the company.
Do you trust them, would you go ahead with accepting that policy?
Of course not, but many privacy policies are effectively no better, and now imagine it's not your bedroom, it's your child's, and it becomes clear why you need to carefully review privacy policies.
For anyone who thinks your government will protect you, if the company baselessly claims they won't hand out the video, or misuse the contents, that generally satisfies the majority of federal security policy.
If you read that, and still find privacy policy boring, you're not paying attention. The amount of kick back I get to that kind of explanation is actually ridiculous, being in that course, I break down the Monday.com privacy policy, and show how it's so invasive, and violating that Epstein would get a hard on.
On the Monday.com privacy policy, they outright state they'll digitally stock you using third-pa
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There's a saying, "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, it is a fire to be kindled." I think attempting to fill vessels instead of start a fire makes a good impression of being boring. So better to focus on kindling fires and watch the results in your students bloom like fireworks.
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This is pretty advanced. What ought to happen is teach kids different things in different stages
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Cutting down on the liberal studies is a good idea, we don't have enough technical courses available at the secondary level, that help supplement an education for a person who doesn't need to read Shakespeare, or learn about WW2 / WW1 in detail. What good does fo
Re: Will cover important fundamentals? (Score:1)
I'd put more emphasis on security. I.e. why your 8 character complex password is shit compared to a 12 character simple password, and why and how to use a password manager. Why we all should have been on webauthn years ago, which tech companies have already moved to but banks still think phone 2FA is good enough for everybody.
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I've been doing this for 30 years (dev, etc.). This should be easy since it's just a basic requirement for a high school curriculum. Alright let's go!
1. What is encryption? How to protect yourself using it.
- Kind of vague. I could exchange public/private certs or a symmetric token. Not sure what the outcome of proficiency is expected here.
2. How to verify identity online, using technology such as PGP.
- Know of it, never used it or needed it
3. How to read and understand software licensing and privacy policie
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ODF is a file format used by various FOSS programs, such as LibreOffice to provide a common format that everybody can use without needing any proprietary programs or needing to buy licenses. There's more, of course, but I'm sure that you're capable of doing the appropriate web search, wh
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1. What is encryption? How to protect yourself using it.
- Drive encryption, that's not by passable (easily) - LUKS, Vera Crypt, etc
- How to use tools like Vera Crypt to protect sensitive files.
- Understanding why removable drives, such as USB, should be encrypted.
- Understanding why encrypted communication is important.
- Understanding you nee
Squishy (Score:5, Insightful)
'Computer literacy' is a fuzzier term to start out with; and can range from terrifyingly basic "how do I press button on android 16?" quasi-vocational stuff; to various product-focused but less trivial things (autocad or arcGIS say) to things that have much less to do with computers specifically and would historically have been taught as some sort of 'media literacy', quite possibly by the school librarian(not that most people really need to know dewey decimal in any detail; but library science programs are often excellent groundings in knowing how to sensibly deal with data sources to obtain actual knowledge).
Whether this change is good or bad seems like it hinges more or less entirely on what they meant by 'CS' previously and what they will mean by 'computer literacy' now. If the old plan was to genuinely attempt to turn high schoolers into apprentice line of business java slingers that is probably worth abandoning; but if they abandon "we'll be thinking about how to decompose a desired outcome into a series of steps, using python as an example" with "how to chat with chatbots" they will be doing the students a considerable disservice.
They can't even read... (Score:5, Insightful)
How are they going to understand a programming language?
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"ChatGPT can you 'asplain this here code thingy?"
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The downfall of what will probably not much longer be a global power. Sad to watch.
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They are done with us (Score:3)
Most of your complaints about education and college or because colleges are built to serve the needs of big business and not your kids. If you look at the experience at a extremely expensive college it is very different than the one you get at a public university especially these days.
The wealthy tell you to skip college and then they send their kids there and they tell you to skip your vaccine and get all their shots. It's always do as I say not as I do
Will they warn not to trust LLMs? (Score:2)
If so, then I think this will be a really good thing.
Vector calculus for all! (Score:2)
No...abstract algebra and complex analysis for all!
After all, the need to prove the computational bounds on finding the complex roots of an arbitrary polynomial is all around us!
CS for all is of the same vein.
Everyone needs to know arithmetic and almost everyone is capable of it. Some people need geometry and trig and many people are capable of that. But not very many people need to or are even remotely capable of winning the Fields Medal. And that's okay.
A similar spectrum of need and aptitude exists for C
Yup (Score:1)