Communications of the ACM

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we’ll publish selected posts or excerpts.

doesn’t mean we make it easier to become a doctor!” That made sense to me, but then I heard others push the metaphor a bit. Adding more nurses and more physician assistants does improve quality of care, and it is less expensive to have more of these health care providers than to produce enough doctors.

Only a few U.S. states offer CS teacher initial certification, which requires a choice to become a CS teacher while still an undergraduate and take years of classes. Georgia and California, like several other states, offer an add-on certification (“endorsement”) teachers can earn after gaining a certification in something else. An endorsement typically still requires multiple semester-long courses. Utah has one of the most innovative CS teacher add-on certification schemes, with three levels: an initial level that requires only some summer professional development, and two further levels requiring post-secondary courses.

Leigh Ann DeLyser hosted a great ses-
sion about CSNYC and the new CS for
All Consortium. CSNYC is charged with
implementing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ini-
tiative to make CS education available to
all students in all grades in all New York
City schools by 2025. DeLyser told us CS-
NYC is defining the Mayor’s initiative as
a school-based mandate. Even 10 years
and $81 million isn’t enough to provide
certified, full-time CS teachers in every
school so every student gets a CS course.

Rather, every school must offer to every student in every grade a high-quality CS learning experience. Maybe that’s a full course, like the BJC CS Principles curriculum now in NYC schools. Alternatively, it might be a Bootstrap unit in an algebra class, or a CT STEM activity that uses StarLogo to achieve NGSS science learning goals. It’s a reasonable incremental approach towards CS for All.

New Hampshire, one of the newest ECEP states, is exploring micro-certifi-cations. Rather than getting a certification as a CS teacher, a mathematics or science teacher might get a micro-cer-tification to demonstrate proficiency in using a computer science approach in their teaching. There might be micro-certificates in Bootstrap, CT STEM, or Project GUTS for middle school science.

We want a future where computer science is taught by certified teachers and is as universally available as mathematics and science classes are today in most U.S. high schools. That’s the vision Briana Morrison and I wrote about in CACM ( http://bit.ly/2iIFeEc). Along the way, we need ways of growing CS education where we develop teachers who know about and teach computer science, even if not full-time, certified CS teachers.

Mark Guzdial Taking Incremental Steps Toward CS for All http://bit.ly/2gCFpSM November 28, 2016

At the end of October, the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) alliance organized a summit with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on state implementation of the President’s CS for All initiative. You can see the agenda at http://bit.ly/2ifPVw Y and a press release on the two days of meetings at http://bit. ly/2iMvyek. I learned a lot at those meetings; one insight I gained was that the CS for All initiative will succeed in increments. U.S. states are developing novel, incremental approaches to CS for All.

The event’s second day was focused on teams from the 16 states and Puerto Rico in the ECEP Alliance. At a session on teacher certifications, some of the attendees were concerned with what they saw as lowering standards in order to get more certified teachers. “We have a shortage of doctors in rural areas. That