CS Education in the States

If you’ve read a recent piece I co-wrote in Communications of the ACM (membership required), you know that the States largely drive education decisions in the US. Because of this, our community has to play "wack-a-mole" when we hear about issues that pop up in the fifty states affecting computer science education. Luckily, the Computer Science Teachers Association has built much of this network, so when Kansas the Board of Regents decided to eliminate computing courses from the core student requirements, we could weigh in with the State. ACM and CSTA sent the board a letter recommending that they put computer science back in the core.

 

To unpack this issue we need to review how Kansas’ education system works. The Kansas State Board of Regents is a nine-member, politically-appointed body that "governs six state universities, and supervises and coordinates 19 community colleges, five technical colleges, six technical schools and a municipal university." State law allows students automatic acceptance into one of Kansas’ public universities if they meet certain requirements. These requirements are called the "Qualified Admission Regulations," which are set by the Board.

 

To meet these requirements, students are required to take four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of natural science, three years of social science and one year of computer technology. The Board then has a set of  standards of content that must be included in these courses. Because of the Qualified Admission’s requirements influence over student admissions, it has become the defacto college prep curriculum in Kansas.

 

Recently the Board convened a task force to review the Qualified Admissions Regulations, which concluded that the technology requirement is outdated and that the content is being taught in other courses. Based on this conclusion, the Board is proposing to cut the computing technology requirement.

 

It turns out that while the technology requirement was intended to be a basic computing literacy course, it allowed many high schools to develop courses with computer science content. ACM and CSTA’s concern is that if the Board eliminates the computing technology requirement students will focus only on the core requirements and computer science courses in Kansas will disappear.

 

To ensure that Kansas’ students are being exposed to rigorous computer science courses and not basic computing literacy, we recommend that:

 

By strengthening computer science education in Kansas, the Board can ensure students are gaining the critical knowledge and skills they will need in the 21st Century.

 

(Special thanks to Tabitha Hogan, a high school computing teacher in Kansas, for flagging this issue for us.)