Microsoft puts $75M into youth initiative
Goal is to increase access to computer science education
Microsoft will invest $75 million over the next three years in initiatives to increase access to computer science education for youth.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella made the announcement during his keynote speech at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual gathering in San Francisco for its customers and partners.
This marks a major expansion of Microsoft’s YouthSpark pro- gram, the company’s effort to get young people hooked on computer science and build a larger, more diverse talent pool for the technology industry.
The shortage of computer science graduates is one of the most pressing issues facing the industry, as is the underrepresentation of women and minorities.
With the new investment, nonprofit organizations around the world will receive donations and resources from Microsoft. And Microsoft will expand its outreach into high schools through TEALS, which stands for Technology Education and Literacy in Schools. The program pairs engineers from Microsoft and other high-tech companies with teachers to team-teach computer science in high schools.
Kevin Wang, a Microsoft engineer with a master’s degree in education from Harvard, proposed the idea in 2009 after volunteering as a computer science teacher at a Seattle public high school. Nadella championed the idea of connecting students with the technology they use every day.
TEALS is aiming to be in 700 high schools in the next three years and in 4,000 over the next decade, focusing on urban and rural districts to reach more young women and minorities, Microsoft executives told USA TODAY.
Microsoft’s investment “really speaks to what we collectively as an industry, as a country and as a society need to do,” Nadella said in an exclusive interview.
Microsoft’s announcement is part of a growing wave of support for computer science education in the nation’s K-12 schools. Major tech companies from Google to Facebook are contributing money and resources to give kids the skills they need to work in the fast-growing and high-paying tech industry. And cities are also placing a new priority on computer science.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced this week a plan to have all the city’s public schools teaching computer science within 10 years.
Two other cities have made similar pledges. Chicago says it plans to make computer science a high school graduation requirement and will offer computer science to at least a quarter of elementary school students by 2018. The San Francisco Board of Education voted in June to phase in computer science from preschool through high school.