ACCESS in the News

By Joanie Harmon | Ampersand

SCALE-CA will provide teacher professional development, build leadership capacity, contribute to research.

Julie Flapan, Jane Margolis, and Jean Ryoo, education researchers at UCLA’s Center X, were recently awarded a four-year $2 million dollar National Science Foundation grant to create a Networked Improvement Community to scale teacher professional development, build the capacity of education leaders for local implementation, and contribute to the research base on expanding equity-minded computer science (CS) teaching and learning opportunities across the state. The project which is called SCALE-CA (Supporting Computer Science Access, Leadership and Equity in California) will use a three-pronged strategy that includes interlocking interventions at the classroom, district and state levels. The focus of SCALE-CA is to build leadership capacity to ensure that equity is kept at the core of CS education expansion efforts and to ensure those efforts involve interventions that are scalable and sustainable.

Flapan, who is the director of the Computer Science Project at UCLA and the executive director of the Alliance for California Computing Education for Students and Schools (ACCESS), says that SCALE-CA presents an unparalleled opportunity for California schools to meet the challenges of providing quality CS education to propel students of color to academic and career success.

“SCALE-CA challenges practitioners, policymakers and researchers to examine our biased beliefs about who is cut out for computer science and as a result, who has access to it,” she says. “As computer science education builds momentum and California scales CS statewide, we are committed to centering equity to increase access, inclusion, andengagement in high quality computer science for all students. Rather than being the next ‘flavor of the day’ in our schools, SCALE-CA hopes to build the necessary infrastructure to ensure computer science education is equitable, scalable, and sustainable.”

The Networked Improvement Community, which is made up of five local education agencies (LEAs) in Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Compton, represent the demographics, geography, and size of California’s diverse school system. This partnership includes ACCESS, which serves as the backbone organization for the statewide campaign CSforCA, UCLA researchers, and the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

In the future, the Networked Improvement Community will expand to include five additional districts and/or county offices of education relatively new to CS education, who will be mentored by the founding five districts, potentially reaching a total of 650,000 high school students. The LEAs will engage with SCALE-CA over a four-year period learning and sharing data-driven practices while collaboratively addressing challenges of broadening participation in computing such as teacher preparation and support, credentialing, developing college and career pathways, and funding.

Among the goals of SCALE-CA are developing a Computer Science Professional Development Week for teachers, counselors, and administrators to focus on equity-minded curricula that can be replicated and customized at a regional level; designing a state-wide district implementation toolkit and workshop for administrators to the implications of equity-driven CS; and informing California policy makers with data to advance statewide expansion that responds to the needs of scalability, equity, and long-term sustainability of socially just CS in the state’s school districts.

California is the sixth largest economy in the world and a “majority minority” state with more than 60% of its six-million public school students identifying as students of color. The state’s size and diversity require a systemic approach to increasing CS opportunities for low-income students, Latinx, African American and Native American students, English language learners, and students with special needs.

For more information about the Computer Science Project at UCLA’s Center X, click here.

Original Article in Ampersand

FEB. 24, 2018 | The New York Times

To the Editor:

We applaud Naomi Schaefer Riley’s Op-Ed essay. As parents, we know all too well the screen-time struggles that families face. Yet, as researchers of computer science education, we believe that Ms. Riley overemphasizes the quantity of screen time while ignoring the quality and content.

We suggest that computer science is the opposite of mindless screen time. Computer science is the problem solving and critical thinking necessary to create and design with technology, not mindless consumption. We are concerned with earlier findings showing how students in underserved schools with high numbers of low-income students of color are often in “technology rich, but curriculum poor” schools — those filled with computers but lacking curriculum that fosters deeper thinking skills.

Fortunately, a national initiative, Computer Science for All, is addressing this digital divide by ensuring that real computer science is offered in all schools with well-prepared teachers. We fully agree that students shouldn’t be mindlessly swiping screens, but they should be learning real computer science and using technology to help solve societal problems.

JANE MARGOLIS
JULIE FLAPAN, LOS ANGELES
Ms. Margolis is lead author of “Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race and Computing.” Ms. Flapan is executive director of the Alliance for California Computing Education for Students and Schools.

Read the Letter to the Editor

Check out this headline article, “Connecting to the Future” featuring ACCESS, along with many of our partners including Code.org, Kapor Center, and SFUSD in the summer 2017 edition of the California School Boards Association “California Schools” Magazine.

Local school boards can be helpful partners as we work to scale-up high quality, equitable and sustainable computer science teaching and learning opportunities across California.  As ACCESS works on parallel strategies to build demand from the ground up, while ensuring equitable opportunities provided by the state, this article may be useful among your networks.

Read the article (text-only)

Connecting to the Future

Corrie Jacobs | California Schools 
The digital divide and computer science instruction in California

Recent projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics specify that there will be as many as 1.4 million computer science job openings by 2020, yet the American educational system will only produce around 400,000 qualified candidates to fill those vacancies. In the rapidly changing 21st century, access to digital technology and computer science coursework is increasingly becoming a vital part of every student’s education. While recent legislation is starting to move California students toward a more connected and creative digital future, from infrastructure to instruction, there are many actions schools still need to take to ensure that students are developing the skills to be college and career ready.

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND EQUITY IN THE CLASSROOM

Nearly a quarter of California high schools offer computer science courses — a statistic that sits far below the goals of education advocates. According to reporting from the Sacramento Bee last year, more California high school students enroll in ceramics classes than they do computer science classes.

“[Computer science] is just as foundational to learning in the 21st century as learning how the digestive system works, how photosynthesis works or how gravity works,” said Hadi Partovi, founder and CEO of Code.org, a nonprofit working to increase computer science instruction through worldwide events, free K-12 curriculum, educator training and more.

Given the rising importance of computer science to college and career success and current gaps in access, the availability of a quality computer science education needs to be considered an equity issue. The demographic breakdown of last year’s Advanced Placement Computer Science A test-takers provides one example of the current equity gaps in computer science instruction. According to the College Board, just 0.5 percent of California’s 1.9 million high school students took the 2016 AP Computer Science A exam, and only 27 percent of the students taking the exam were female. Less than 1,500 were Latino students, less than 150 were African-American students, and only seven Native American/Alaskan Native students, six of whom were boys, took that same exam.

“We often think of education as being this level playing field, but if kids don’t have exposure to the same types of learning opportunities, then we’re only furthering achievement gaps in school and economic gaps that we see later on,” said Julie Flapan, executive director of the Alliance for California Computing Education for Students and Schools, commonly known as ACCESS.

Students who study computer science can look forward to a variety of career opportunities. A study produced by Code.org found that computing jobs are the top source of new wages in the nation. In California, a career in the computing field provides an average salary that is close to double the average salary of the state.

Moreover, advocates stress that a computer science education pays off in all sectors and serves all students regardless of career path. “Computer science is now part of every single industry — whether it’s auto mechanics, agriculture or the entertainment industry, there is now computer science embedded in everything we do,” said Flapan.

As the importance of computational thinking increases in every career field, the absence of computer science instruction in K-12 schools will only deepen equity gaps. “Teaching 21stcentury skills in California’s public schools is the key to a brighter future,” said CSBA CEO & Executive Director Vernon M. Billy. “In order for all of our state’s 6.2 million students to become college and career ready, school board members need to examine how their students access technology and computer science instruction.”

Read the article in the magazine