Communications of the ACM

Vviewpoints

to address issues of engagement and education. While specifically charged with addressing the long-standing underrepresentation of many groups within the computing community, many, if not most, of the Alliances’ activities also worked to increase awareness, access, engagement, and inclusion for all students. The Alliances’ strategies encompass not only activity design and implementation but also promotion of computing education through workshops and information dissemination.

Considered together as a whole, the BPC Alliances are expected to have significant impact on both the quality of opportunities afforded to participants and the number of participants. To assess this collective impact, in 2012, EDC, Inc., was awarded a contract to evaluate the accomplishments and impacts of the BPC-A program as a whole. They partnered with Westat, Inc., and the College of Education at Kansas State University in the multiple-year evaluation to investigate the BPC-A program’s creation of a national system of resources to support broadening participation in computing, focusing document review on the first five years (2006–2011) and empirical data collection on the second five years of program funding (2011–2016).

As of 2011, there were eight BPC Alliances:

˲ Access Computing (AC), University of Washington; http://www.washing- ton.edu/accesscomputing/

˲ Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), University of Texas at El Paso; http://cahsi. cs.utep.edu/

˲ Sustainable Diversity in the Computing Research Pipeline: Computing Research Association-Women/ The Coalition to Diversity Computing ( CRA-W/CDC), the Computing Research Association in Washington D.C.; http:// cra.org/cra-w/

˲ Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP), University of Massa-

IN EARLY 2016, the White House announced a government-wide investment in computing edu- cation—Computer Science for All—to be included in the President’s 2017 budget. Computer Science for All would give every P– 12 student the chance to learn computer science and to be given the opportunities “that allow them to join the innovation economy, have the tools to solve our toughest challenges, and become active citizens in our increasingly technological world.” 2 A major component of the initiative is inclusion in computing by students from underrepresented groups, such as African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. The White House announcement stated that CS for All builds on computing education momentum at state and local levels.

Although the sources of this mo-
mentum were not named, we speculate
that an important impetus for innova-
tion and growth in computer science
P– 12 education comes from programs
funded at the federal level, such as the
NSF-funded CS 10K initiative, and com-
munity efforts, such as code.org. Pre-
dating these P– 12 education efforts, the
National Science Foundation launched
the Broadening Participation in Com-
puting (BPC) program in 2006 as a mod-
el to effectively address the issues of un-
derrepresentation, as well as respond
to the need to increase participation
in computing education and produce
computing professionals. Chubin and
Johnson1 provided a description of the
11 alliances that constituted the core
of BPC as of 2009. In total, 15 BPC Alli-
ances (BPC-A) have been funded. These
Alliances represent broad coalitions of
academic postsecondary institutions,
secondary and middle schools, govern-
ment, industry, professional societies,
and other not-for-profit organizations.

The goal of BPC-Alliances is to design and carry out comprehensive programs to reduce underrepresentation in the computing disciplines at various stages of the academic pathway from K– 12 through the early faculty ranks. To this end, the BPC-Alliances have endeavored to create the best practices, educational resources, advocacy networks, and forums needed