| 摘要 | Editor’s note: The next president is in for a rough welcome to the Oval Office given the list of immediate crises and slow-burning policy challenges, both foreign and domestic. What should Washington do? Why should the average American care? We’ve set out to clearly define US strategic interests and provide actionable policy solutions to help the new administration build a 2017 agenda that strengthens American leadership abroad while bolstering prosperity at home.
What to Do: Policy Recommendations for 2017 is an ongoing project from AEI. Click here for access to the complete series, which addresses a wide range of issues from rebuilding America’s military to higher education reform to helping people find work.
Key Points
Several major urban school districts are exploring some sort of universal computer science education; in New York, computer science will be available to all students, and in Chicago and San Francisco, it will be mandatory for all.
High school graduation requirements and college application guidelines do not give sufficient credit for computer science work. Therefore, schools and students will have incentives to avoid computer science and favor other topics where achievement will be better recognized.
While urban school districts will have an unusually easy time raising money, recruiting teachers, and engaging with innovative curriculum developers, smaller districts should be aware that adding computer science to the curriculum will pose considerable challenges.
Introduction
There has been considerable political pressure in the past few years to incorporate more computer science education into American secondary schools. In his 2016 State of the Union message, President Barack Obama announced the goal of “offering every student the hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready on day one.”1 To achieve this goal, the president has requested several billion dollars in grants to schools for technology education and has channeled federal research money into improving computer science education.2 Considerable amounts of money are going to be spent, and considerable curricular changes are being considered. The public, the policy community, and other parts of government should pay attention. We have reasonable prospects for a major improvement to American education—but also the opportunity to waste an immense amount of time, money, and opportunity.
Education, of course, is primarily controlled at the state and school-district level. We must look there to understand what concrete policies are likely to follow from grand national rhetoric. Three major cities, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, have separately announced some sort of “universal” computer science initiative. This paper will study these initiatives in detail. They are large, well-documented initiatives and are likely to set influential examples, whether they succeed or fail.
We begin by presenting the goals of these initiatives, the content they teach, and how they will be integrated into the school curriculum. Then the paper considers three related questions: Can these initiatives achieve their goals? Are they sustainable? Can they be replicated elsewhere? It closes with suggestions for policymakers seeking to emphasize computer science going forward.
There are grounds for cautious optimism. In the short to medium term, these initiatives have a good chance of getting many more students, particularly female students, into computer science. However, there will be difficulties in sustaining these programs and exporting them to other cities, unless high school graduation and college admissions standards are reformed.
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