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

[Don Davis]

> Its more about what they are allowed to teach or choose to teach. You
> could teach the principles of FOSS, the importance of international
> open standards etc even without direct access to specific software
> titles.

True enough. At a K-12 level though, many (most) teachers will ignore
anything not explicitly detailed in content standards. As CS and other
not "core" classes (such as art) are under the magnifying glass as the
much as "core" teachers.

How many of them choose to function as software agnostics? (Whereby they
are in fact not neutral but in fact supporting proprietary software
paradigms.)

How many of them have time or scope of vision that extends beyond state
mandated standards, UIL, or AP tests? While there certainly are such
teachers, they are a small percentage of an already small group.

I do think that the software is a big issue. By teaching students to
program in JCreator on a Windows platform - that becomes their reference
point, their default mental model for what programming looks like.

Does the school use Dr. Java on MS? Sure, it's open but it's on a
proprietary OS. Little attention is drawn to the purpose or use of FOSS.
(Similarly, most macs have a copy the GPL but how many mac users would
recognize it?)

This gets into far ranging ethical debates concerning the moral software
compasses, figured worlds, and interpretive ideological frameworks of a
small number of teachers in an already marginalized field.

Teaching FOSS may be akin to teaching "fair use" in schools. Most of the
materials regarding "fair use" provided to librarians come from the
MPAA... (Though EFF has put together materials.) Proprietary software
companies shell out tons of money to be at educator conferences - free
software has little visibility in such places.

The logistics and difficulty of getting FOSS recognized in schools are
problematic.