What can be done to boost Ariz. computer science education?

A new report shows Arizona ranked near the bottom of states nationally for the share of high schools offering computer science classes.

According to the 2023 State of Computer Science Education report, 36% of public high schools in Arizona offer computer science classes, significantly below the national average of 58%. That data was based on the most recent school year available, which for Arizona was the 2020-21 school year, though other states had more recent data.

The report was written by three groups interested in improving computer science education: Code.org, the Computer Science Teacher Association and the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance.

What’s missing? Direction from the state, advocate says

Arizona has already made some strides toward increasing access to computer science education.

In 2018, the Department of Education adopted K-12 computer science curriculum standards. Soon after, it launched a professional development grant program to help high schools launch their first computer science classes, for which the state Legislature allocates $1 million per year.

Still, there are barriers to offering computer science courses, especially for small and rural schools.

According to the 2023 report, 19% of Arizona’s small schools — those with fewer than 500 students — offered computer science classes, compared with 43% of its medium schools and 79% of its large schools, which have more than 1,200 students. Only 27% of the state’s rural schools offered a course.

Computer science gets passed over when schools are pressed to fill positions for core requirements, said Code.org curriculum writer Dan Schneider, a former Tucson high school computer science teacher and former Arizona Computer Science Teachers Association president.

On the flip side, he said, Arizona does a good job of incentivizing computer science through career and technical education programs. But not all schools necessarily have the resources or the capacity to sustain those programs, Schneider said.

“It’s the schools that have to make those hard decisions, the schools that can’t find teachers, the schools in more rural areas ... those are the schools that aren’t adopting, and there are a bunch of systemic barriers there,” he said.

There are several ways to become a computer science teacher in Arizona. In May 2019, the State Board of Education approved endorsement options, which are add-ons to teaching certificates. They require educators to complete a certain number of college credits of computer science coursework or equivalent professional development training.

Individuals also can get certifications to teach career and technical education courses, which often require some industry experience.

The relatively new endorsements, which allow professional development hours to be used to earn a certification, are the most common and realistic options for educators, according to Schneider. Professional development options are generally less expensive and time-consuming than university coursework, according to a Code.org report on teacher credentialing.

In this way, Arizona is a leader, he said. Only a handful of states allow computer science teachers to be certified without coursework.

While Schneider said he is happy with Arizona’s endorsement options, he said he wishes local universities provided better options for teachers to earn endorsements through teacher-focused credit-bearing classes.

“None of the major Arizona universities offer courses directly aligned to this endorsement,” Schneider said.

In terms of professional development, the Arizona Science Center trains teachers on the Code.org curriculum through one-day workshops for kindergarten through fifth grade teachers and nine-day workshops for middle and high school teachers. Since the center became a Code.org partner, it has trained roughly 350 to 400 teachers, according to Beth Nickel, the center’s chief academic officer.

In Schneider’s view, the training options are already out there. But to close the gaps in which schools offer computer science courses and which students take them, “it’s going to take some policy,” he said.

“The thing that’s sort of missing is direction,” Schneider said.

Schneider wants Arizona to create a publicly available state plan for computer science education, with the goal of first making it a requirement for all schools to offer a computer science class and ultimately making it a graduation requirement. Those are core recommendations for Arizona made in the 2023 State of Computer Science Education report.

These policies are growing in popularity across the country. Thirty states have adopted plans, 29 states require all high schools to offer computer science and eight states have chosen to adopt graduation requirements, according to the report.

Even for students who realize they don’t want to be a programmer or work in the tech industry, a foundation in computer science will still “give them an upper hand, because now they understand technology that they’re going to use throughout their lives,” said Bhawna Verma, a Paradise Valley Unified School District computer science teacher and an Arizona Computer Science Teachers Association leader.

‘Dismal’: How many Arizona students are taking computer science?

In the 2020-21 school year, just 2% of Arizona high school students took a computer science class.

“That’s just dismal,” said Leon Tynes, a computer science teacher at Xavier College Preparatory and Arizona Computer Science Teachers Association leader. At Xavier, a private, Catholic allgirls school in Phoenix, computer science has been a graduation requirement for more than 10 years, he said.

“We’ve been undereducating students for the tech industry,” he said. “We are in the middle of a tech bonanza here in the state, and we haven’t responded in K through 12 education appropriately.”

In 2023, Arizona averaged more than 9,000 open computing jobs each month, with an average salary of nearly $105,000, according to the 2023 State of Computer Science Education report.

It’s not enough to offer computer science as just an elective, said Tynes, who wants Arizona to make it a graduation requirement.

In the meantime, Tynes said he thinks there are things teachers and administrators can do to increase participation. It’s important for students to see computer science as a tool rather than a subject and to have opportunities to bring their interests into the classroom, he said.

For instance, his Advanced Placement students build apps to address environmental and social issues. For one class project, a student group found ways to use technology to mitigate tire waste. When he taught in elementary school, he received grant funding to build a smart garden where students would use technological devices and an app to monitor metrics like soil quality and wind.

“Having that purpose … really gets students to bring their own interests into the classroom,” Tynes said. And giving them opportunities to show off their work — putting it on GitHub, building a website, entering a competition — can help recruit other students as well, he said.

Paradise Valley Unified’s Verma, a computer science engineer, was driven to education because the gender gap and lack of equity in the computer science industry shocked her, she said.

When she began teaching, she said she found that the gender gap also existed at the high school level. At the beginning of her career in education, a computer science class would be 25 boys and one or two girls, she said.

“Because it was so male-dominated, girls were hesitating to even take the class,” Verma said. “But … once they started learning, and then they knew how to program, and their first program worked out, then you can see the sparkle in their eyes” and their confidence.