Last week, my wife showed me a great story in the Cedar Mill News about a remarkable group of Westview High School students who set up a non-profit called the NorthWest Data Science Collective "dedicated to democratizing data science education for underserved communities. Established in 2022 and based in Portland, Oregon, NWDSC targets low-income and minority students, providing them with free, virtual educational programs in programming, machine learning, and statistical applications. The courses focus on interactive and hands-on learning, culminating in capstone projects where students apply their skills to real-world problems." NWDSC offers instruction in Data Science, Machine Learning, Programming, and Artificial Intelligence. Their motto is "Empowering young students with the wonders of data science".
When I heard about NWDSC, my first thought was how great it is that a dedicated group of kids is helping prepare Oregon for the future by giving underprivileged students the technical skills they'll need to succeed. According to the NWDSC website, they've reached over 100 students, a great achievement for the four members of the NWDSC team.
But, according to the Oregon Blue Book, the number of students in Oregon's public schools for kindergarten through 12th grade, is 571,018. Shouldn't we be providing computer science education to all of them?
You might wonder why these altruistic volunteers decided on computer science education as their best opportunity to improve the futures of underserved communities. Why, for example, did they not create a program focused on math, chemistry, or something else?
Perhaps the NWDSC team was aware of the sad reality that Oregon is the worst state in the country for computer science education, and they saw an opportunity to fill that need.
You might be surprised that I say that Oregon is the worst state for computer science education. But every year, Code.org produces a report on computer science education. Code.org's 2023 State of Computer Science Education report ranks every state on 10 key policy initiatives. Page 11 of the report has a map of the United States labeling each state with the number of policies that the state implements that promote computer science education. Oregon is in last place since we only implement one out of the 10 policies.
The things we fail to do include:
Oregon has no standards for computer science education
Oregon dedicates no money to train teachers to teach computer science
If someone wants to become a computer science teacher, there's no pathway to get certified in computer science education
There are no statewide requirements that schools teach computer science
There's no statewide policy to allow computer science to count towards a core graduation requirement
There's no statewide policy to allow computer science to satisfy a college admission requirement
In short, we're not encouraging schools to offer computer science, teachers to teach computer science, or students to take computer science. This is in stark contrast to the many other areas funded in Oregon's public schools -- math, English, chemistry, art, music, history, basketball, soccer, ...
People, we can do better than this. If we want to prepare our children for a world where algorithms determine what information they see, robots are becoming omnipresent in their lives, and artificial intelligence is producing an increasing amount of the content that distract their attention; where technical knowledge is critical to getting a job -- any job, we must do better.
The good news is that Oregon published a Plan for Computer Science Education in December of last year. Remarkably, the main goal of the plan is almost the same as NWDSC's goal -- to ensure that Oregon provides computer science education equitably to all of Oregon's students. This plan lays out the specific steps we need to take to make computer science education a viable reality in Oregon.
But this plan will go nowhere without funding, which means that we need to pass legislation to provide that funding. And the first step to creating such a law is to create a legislative concept. This legislative concept should contain three items:
Permanently fund a "CS Education Director", a position in the Oregon Department of Education to be responsible for computer science education
Allocate 1/2 of 1 percent of ODE's budget for computer science education
Give the CS Education Director complete control over how the money for computer science education is spent.
Oregon legislators, I'm talking to you. I need someone to work with me to create a legislative concept and introduce it to the House of Representatives. And the deadline for creating such a concept is September 27th, less than three weeks away! Please step up to help fund this vital initiative.