[TOS] CS certification for K12 - what is out there?

[Bonnie MacKellar]

My kids are in public school in an affluent district in Westchester County, NY. There is plenty of money for video production labs, drama, and trips. The schools are well equipped with computers. NY state has a "technology" requirement. And yet, we have no computer science in our schools at all. We have plenty of classes in Powerpoint, Word, and digital scrapbooking. The 6th graders are required to take a course that teaches them those skills. But there is no real computer science.

I volunteered to run a Scratch club afterschool at the elementary school (parents are not allowed to run clubs in the middle school). It was vetoed by the district IT director, who didn't want open source software on the computers.

There is no interest in adding courses on computing here because the parents see it as "vocational". I suspect this attitude is common in affluent districts everywhere. Those are usually the districts that drive innovations - many of the schools in my area are adding Mandarin for example -  so I might suggest that reaching out to parents is a better way to bring computing into the schools.

Bonnie MacKellar

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Don Davis
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 9:09 AM
To: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: Re: [TOS] CS certification for K12 - what is out there?

 I think that the root cause is a
> systemic issue. Feedback from my high school teachers indicates that 
> until CS is a "real" discipline, it won't be given the emphasis and 
> resources that it needs. It may be that the government at the US or 
> state level will have to mandate that students need to achieve a 
> certain level of competence in computing before computing will be 
> widely adopted in middle and high schools.

What if there was some sort of STEM (or STEAM) ranking for schools endorsed by a professional educator association of some sort or other like minded organization (e.g. CSTA, ACM, etc..)?


Much like a Zagat (or Better Business Bureau) review of schools - a non-profit independent listing of schools' STEM rating whereby "real"
tech courses (such as robotics) are weighted high as well as special accolades for 'real' CS0 programs (Scratch, Alice, Starlogo etc and NOT office productivity apps such as Word, publisher).


Yes, what happened to CS becoming a "real" discipline in schools? There certainly was a lot of commotion about making CS (and CT type stuff) at the core of academics in "A Nation at Risk." 30 years later, everything's being cut to focus on multiple choice reading and math tests.
_______________________________________________
tos mailing list
tos at teachingopensource.org
http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos