Stuck in the Shallow End: Race, Education and Computing

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 18:11

The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low. Relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities and preparation needed for them to choose computer science as a field of study and profession. Let us look at the daily experiences of students in three Los Angeles public high schools: an overcrowded urban high school, a math and science magnet school and a well funded school in an affluent neighborhood. We will find a kind of ΓÇ£virtual segregationΓÇ¥ that maintains inequality by: -providing a lack of qualified teachers -isolating the teachers that do exist -the narrowing of the curriculum toward test taking prep -misguided technology politics that donΓÇÖt distinguish access to computers and access to computational thinking. We will also see how students and teachers, given the necessary tools: can change the system.