How Silicon Valley pushed coding into American classrooms

At a White House gathering of tech titans last month, Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, delivered a blunt message to President Donald Trump on how public schools could better serve the nation’s needs. To help solve a “huge deficit in the skills that we need today,” Cook said, the government should do its part to make sure students learn computer programming.

“Coding,” Cook told the president, “should be a requirement in every public school.”

The Apple chief’s education mandate was just the latest tech company push for coding courses in schools. But even without Trump’s support, Silicon Valley is already advancing that agenda — thanks largely to the marketing prowess of Code. org, an industry-backed nonprofit group.

Code.org was founded in 2012 by Hadi Partovi, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb, and his twin, Ali Partovi, himself an early investor in Zappos and Dropbox. The group first gained renown by using a viral video to stir up mass demand for coding lessons. Now Code.org’s goal is to get every public school in the United States to teach computer science.

In our tech-driven world, Hadi Partovi argues, computer science has become as essential for students as reading, writing and math. “Encryption is at least as foundational as photosynthesis,” he said.

Computer science is also essential to U.S. tech companies, which have become heavily reliant on foreign engineers. Trump’s efforts to limit immigration make Code.org’s teach-americans-tocode agenda even more attractive to the industry.

In a few short years, Code.org has raised more than $60 million from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Salesforce, along with individual tech executives and foundations. It has helped to persuade two dozen states to change their education pol-