Blurts

Prioritizing STEM within K12 may seem a significant departure from past priorities. Has this happened before? I must have been part of the post Sputnik push. There was certainly a great awareness of the Russian accomplishment and great concern, but I don’t think the actual courses offered changed at the elementary or secondary level. I am not sure. Being submerged in a system is sometimes not the best vantage point for viewing what is actually going on. I understand that there were major initiatives that involved the dedication of significant resources, but that seemed mostly an investment in research and perhaps greater support for higher education.

We seem to be in another Sputnik era. This time the K12 investment is in Computer Science, or perhaps because the focus is somewhat different, coding and computational thinking. The prioritization is not so much a threat from other nations, although China has made a great commitment to the speciality of AI, as it is the perception of nearly unlimited employment opportunities. While I do think the jobs, jobs, jobs coding focus has eased, why does this employment issue as a K12 focus seem to ebb and flow in public perception? Is it because of the cost of a college education and what does that have to do with K12 priorities anyway?

I am concerned that what remains of the vocational push has been augmented by promoters of the new mental capabilities of computational thinking. I have read many papers attempting to define computational thinking including Wing’s original argument. For me, most harken back to Seymour Papert’s writings in the early 1980s. Then, the promotion of a new and powerful way to develop thinking skills was heavily researched without the conclusion that this claim was valid. We seem engaged in a similar promotion of programming without the research of the Papert era.

I direct readers to a recent Forbes article echoing my position. I have written about the promotion of coding so many times it is probably best if I point readers to other sources offering a different or at least broader perspective. The Forbes article is very well done and examines the STEM issue from multiple points of view. The Forbes article makes some interesting arguments related to just how many jobs in computer science actually exist and questions whether this number will be increasing in the future.

Perhaps what is really needed at this point is a more general reconsideration of just what K12 and maybe even higher education are funded to accomplish. We seem to drift in and out of focusing on vocational preparation and even what employers want. How much of what is needed are skills unique to a given profession and how much is a focus on specific dispositions and thinking skills?

A careful consideration of the goals of education is important as we risk losing sight of important goals. We may even be creating a caste system within the ranks of K12 educators. I read an account of what I suppose was a well-meaning STEM promoter arguing that a differential salary system should be instituted at the K12 level to entice more STEM talent into teaching. I have heard of signing bonuses, but not a new variable added to the pay scale. I also question whether the greatest needs we face as a society will be solved by a greater emphasis on math and science. Problems that seem scientific in nature such as climate change are not problems that are problems because of science, but problems because of human values and the inability to understand abstract challenges that are inconvenient to address. The high school physics course and other physical science courses may offer an explanation, but not change what needs to be changed to affect a solution