MAKING THE CASE FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE IN COVID ERA

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the digital divide in the United States quite clear: When schools switched to remote learning, they had to scramble to get Internet and laptop access to their low-income students and students of color. Unfortunately, getting the proper hardware and WiFi signal is not enough to close the gap. We also need to talk about prioritizing computer science education. If we don’t, the implications of inequitable access will affect our society and technology workforce for years to come.

The recent “2020 State of Computer Science Education: Illuminating Disparities” sheds light on the massive disparities surfaced during this era. But our problems with access to computer science education predate the pandemic. According to the Kapor Center and CSforCA, even California, a state known for its technology and innovations, had less than 39% of high schools offering computer science (CS) and two-thirds lacked any computer courses at all.

It is even worse at low-income schools, where 75% offer no CS courses. Participation in computer science is lacking especially for girls and students of color as only 36 Black girls and 453 Latinx girls took AP CS in California in 2019.

The issue is not unknown: According to Code.org, nine out of ten parents understand the importance of having computer science classes offered at schools. And in the past two years, the University of California system has added computer science classes as options in the math and science requirements for admissions.

California’s economy needs more people with coding skills. But computer science goes beyond coding. The field also teaches hardware and software design — and advances a deep understanding of the algorithms and applications that run our technological lives.

We have an obligation to teach our youth computer science so they can combat algorithms that exacerbate racism. We need cybersecurity scientists to critically understand racial ramifications of surveillance. We need future web developers to continue to organize the #BlackLivesMatter movement and youth-led causes to tackle climate change.

The present and future generation of computer scientists and programmers should ref lect our country’s growing diverse demographics.

Bringing in student voices matters. The pandemic and lockdown hit just when we were in the middle of our CS LISTEN project at UC San Diego, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The project centers on youth participatory action research to look at why students aren’t taking computer science and to broaden participation among students of color and female students. We developed teams of student co-researchers to understand and tackle this issue with us.

Along with including student voices, we need to build the next workforce of CS teachers. We must also invest more in teachers who are already teaching other subjects. According to the latest CS Equity Guide, to deal with these inequities, administrators should focus on further developing computer science teachers in their respective schools and follow the California Department of Education ’s Computer Science Content Standards Development.

State-level funding is one of the main ways to increase educators teaching CS through professional learning. Unfortunately, according to the “2020 State of Computer Science Education: Illuminating Disparities” report, like many states, California’s budget for teacher professional development and supervisor positions was reallocated once COVID-19 hit.

As school districts determine their budgets for the next fiscal year, they should recognize that offering computer science classes serves as a medium that can enrich other subjects — including language arts, social studies, science and mathematics — without disadvantaging the future of our students.

Lastly, our U.S. labor markets demand that we train the next workforce to be experts in computer science and technology. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these occupations are projected to grow 11% from 2019 to 2029, at a faster rate than most other occupations. The median annual wages for these computing occupations also exceed the median wages for all occupations. Most importantly, if we want to see our society recover from this global economic recession, we have to invest in computer science education.

Prioritizing computer science education is critical to our state’s future and should be a bipartisan concern. In the end, our governor, educational policymakers, computer scientists, concerned parents, teachers and other stakeholders, all of us, must not lose sight of the importance of computing education. Even as we struggle with online schooling during the pandemic, it is important to continue to fight for access to computer science, too.

Mai is Code.org regional partnership program manager at UC San Diego’s CREATE and a doctoral candidate in educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives in University Town Center. Simon is a professor in the Department of Education Studies at UC San Diego and lives in Tierrasanta.