TITLE: Supply, Demand, and K-12 CS
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 23, 2014  8:50 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
When I meet with prospective students and their parents, we
often end up discussing why most high schools don't teach
computer science.  I tell them that, when I started as a new
prof here, about a quarter of incoming freshmen had taken a
year of programming in high school, and many other students
had had the opportunity to do so.  My colleagues and I figured
that this percentage would go way up, so we began to think
about how we might structure our first-year courses when most
or all students already knew how to program.

However, the percentage of incoming students with programming
experience didn't go up.  It went way down.  These days, about
10% of our freshman know how to program when they start our
intro course.  Many of those learned what they know on their
own.  What happened, today's parents ask?

A lot of things happened, including the dot-com bubble, a drop
in the supply of available teachers, a narrowing of the high
school curriculum in many districts, and the introduction of
high-stakes testing.  I'm not sure how much each contributed to
the change, or whether other factors may have played a bigger
role.  Whatever the causes, the result is that our intro course
still expects no previous programming experience.

Yesterday, I saw a post by a K-12 teacher on the Racket users
mailing list that illustrates the powerful pull of economics.
He is leaving teaching for software development industry, though
reluctantly.  "The thing I will miss the most," he says, "is the
enjoyment I get out of seeing youngsters' brains come to life."
He also loves seeing them succeed in the careers that knowing
how to program makes possible.  But in that success lies the
seed of his own career change:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Speaking of my students working in the field, I simply grew too
 tired of hearing about their salaries which, with a couple of
 years experience, was typically twice what I was earning with
 25+ years of experience.  Ultimately that just became too much
 to take.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

He notes that college professors probably know the feeling, too.
The pull must be much stronger on him and his colleagues, though;
college CS professors are generally paid much better than K-12
teachers.  A love of teaching can go only so far.  At one level,
we should probably be surprised that anyone who knows how to
program well enough to teach thirteen- or seventeen-year-olds to
do it stays in the schools.  If not surprised, we should at least
be deeply appreciative of the people who do.
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