Posted by CSTA on behalf of The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance

The Expanding Computing Education Pathways alliance (http://ecepalliance.org) is an NSF-funded alliance to broaden participation in computing. Our focus is on the education pathways (from elementary through high school, to community college and universities), because that’s our best chance to reach underserved populations. Our challenge is that education policies vary dramatically from state-to-state, so we can’t come up with one solution that works for everybody. A model that we promote for getting started in a state is:

• Step 1: Find a leader(s): You need a leader (or a couple) who will take the initiative and who see(s) the big picture of how schools, higher education, businesses, and state politics have to work together to make change within a state.
• Step 2: Understand your state’s policies: Who makes the decisions in your state about high school graduation requirements, teacher certification, and high school curricula? Where does computing fit within your state’s policies? Think about writing a landscape report that lays out the current state of computing education within your state. (There are several of these available at the CSTA website, such as one from South Carolina and another on Maryland.)
• Step 3: Gather your allies: Efforts that speak with multiple voices from different sectors promoting computing education tend to get more influence in state government. Computing education summits are where you meet face-to-face, to talk about shared goals and come up with strategies that all the allies can work on.
• Step 4: Get initial funding: Landscape reports, summits, and other meetings take some small pots of funding to get you started, before the big ticket items, like professional learning opportunities for all your high school teachers.

If every state has different policies, how do we measure progress? How can we tell that things are getting better, or which states are moving ahead and faster than others? Every year, Barbara Ericson of ECEP collates the College Board data on who took the Advanced Placement® Computer Science (AP CS) exam. Data on AP CS doesn’t cover all computing education in a state, but it’s likely a close measure and it gives us a way of comparing progress in states. The College Board doesn’t know how many AP CS teachers there are, but does track how many schools pass the audit which allows them to offer AP CS. Most schools that pass the audit have exactly one teacher, so counting schools that pass the audit is a rough count of AP CS teachers.

Barbara’s analysis of AP CS A in 2013 (available here) got a lot of press coverage, including the New York Times, CNN, Slate, and Washington Post (see a list here). Barbara has a preliminary set of results available now on the 2014 data (her analysis and data are available here). Here are some of the national highlights:

• The number of AP CS exam takers rose 26.29% in 2014 (from 29,444 to 37,327).
• The number of schools passing the audit rose a little over 10% (from 2,252 to 2,525). The big difference in those two statistics (27% more test-takers, only 10% more teachers) means that each teacher is getting more students to take the AP CS exam.
• Women, Black (the College Board’s category), and Hispanic exam takers all increased about 35%. That’s faster than the overall exam taker growth at 27%, but just barely. In 2013, 18.5% of exam takers were female. In 2014, 20.0% of exam takers were female.
• A smaller percentage of students passed (from 66.86% to 61% overall), and that was true within demographic groups, too. 62% of female exam takers passed in 2013, but only 57% this year. A drop in pass rates is not too unexpected if we are getting more students into the exam, especially if new students are coming from schools and teachers new to teaching AP CS.

When we get to the individual states, the picture is more complex, but is still striking in terms of how little AP CS there is yet in some states.

• 18 states had less than 100 people total take the AP CS exam in 2014. Montana had only 4 exam takers (all male). Mississippi also had four exam takers (one female), and though the state is 38% Black, they had no Black AP CS exam takers. Wyoming didn’t have a single AP CS exam-taker in 2013 or 2014.
• California leads the nation in number of AP CS exam takers and had the biggest gain in exam taking, with a 34% increase from 2013 to 2014. Florida jumped from 8th in the US to 4th with a 39%. Maryland had surprisingly little growth from 2013 (from 1629 students in 2013 to 1639 in 2014) and dropped from 5th to 8th.
• California is also the most populous state. Maryland has the most exam takers for its population, followed by Virginia and New Jersey.
• We are nowhere near gender-balance in AP CS exam taking. With 1/4 (25%), Mississippi has the highest percentage of females taking the AP CS exam. The next three top states are Washington (260/1048 = 25%), Oklahoma (42/171 = 25%), and Texas (1102/4551 = 24%). The states with the least female participation in AP CS exam-taking are Montana (0/4), Wyoming (0/0), Mississippi (1/4), North Dakota (1/14), Nebraska (2/71), Kansas (3/40), Alaska (4/30), South Dakota (4/29), Utah (5/104), and Delaware (7/79).
• Barbara is still going through the race data, but even the bright spots still aren’t that bright. Maryland had the most Black exam takers (192) with a 30% pass rate, which means that 12% of their exam takers were Black. 30% of Maryland’s population is Black. Texas was second (161 exam takers, 40% pass rate), which is 4% Black exam takers in a state that is 12% Black.

These results are positive in terms of growth, but we have a long way to go. AP CS is smaller and more gender-skewed than any other AP exam (see Brian Danielak’s insightful visualization here). We use AP CS as a measure for CS education in the United States overall. Computer science in high schools is rare, mostly male, and mostly white or Asian. That’s what we’re trying to fix.

Excerpt | Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology

We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For
Mary Grove and Megan Smith

Mary Grove is Google’s director of global entrepreneurship outreach where she leads Google for Entrepreneurs, the company’s programs and partnerships to support start-ups and entrepreneurs in more than 100 countries around the world.

Megan Smith is the newly named U.S. chief technology officer. She is a former Google executive with a background in entrepreneurship and engineering.

All of us have inherited from history great gifts, innovations, wonderful culture, and sadly, extraordinary biases—both conscious and unconscious.

Today, the vast majority of gender bias is unconscious.The Equality Challenge Unit has shared extensive research about the nature and effect of bias; for example, our unconscious brain processes large amounts of information and looks for patterns 200,000 times faster than the conscious brain, and when it sees patterns occurring together (like seeing men alone in senior leadership), it wires those thoughts together neurally.

As we become much more aware of and educated about the complexities of these biases, how they operate, and the pain and extraordinary economic, cultural, political, creative, and social loss they cause for humanity, it’s our responsibility to act, to shift, to upgrade. None of us created these problems, but we can be the ones to make a huge push to fix them.

The gender gap is very real. If we quickly look at just the United States, we know that women make up 14 percent of Fortune 500 Executive Committees, 17 percent of Congress, and 11 percent of CEO/founder positions of U.S. firms backed by venture capital. These numbers vary by country around the world, but in most cases they are sadly similar or worse, and only on rare exception are they better. The treatment of women varies by country, including extreme regions where women are basically treated as property, places where nearly all of the sixteen points voiced in the historic Declaration of Sentiments, created at the world’s first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, are still operating culturally and often legally. (If you haven’t already, the Declaration of Sentiments is worth reading to reflect on how far we have and have not come since the mid-1800s.)

For most of history, the vast majority of people were exposed to and became comfortable with a disparate reality for men and women. In every generation, there have been giants, both women and men, who have worked tirelessly for gender equality—but they faced, and still face, a constant uphill battle.

Today it feels like we’re at a tipping point in many parts of the world, where a growing majority of people are conscious of the need for women’s equal rights for so many reasons—that we are perhaps about to accelerate on our path to real, meaningful, and lasting gender equality. Activists, artists, and change makers everywhere continue to build upon centuries of incredible work, now that the Internet has dramatically expanded their reach and voice. Conversations abound about the empowerment of women and girls—moved from the sidelines to the center stage at the UN, across developed and developing countries. Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, has provoked greater dialogue across professional sectors, and research firms like McKinsey and Catalyst, alongside business schools like Kellogg, Harvard, and MIT, are doing the research we have long needed that shows why it’s economically valuable to have gender-inclusive and balanced teams, and how unconscious bias is operating everywhere to block progress. Long-standing groups who work for gender equality in technology fields, like National Center for Women & Information Technology and the Anita Borg Institute, are getting much more mainstream access to senior executives and others to help educate for change. Research now proves that gender-diverse teams and leadership make better products, companies, organizations, families, communities, and countries.

People across the world responded to the idea Vivek, Tavinder, Farai, Neesha, and their team had to collaboratively create this book—hundreds of women were able to efficiently contribute their personal stories. These are important accounts of their own difficult experiences with the real and perceptual historic biases we have inherited and how they are moving to write our next chapter. Thank you to everyone who has shared useful stories, broad experiences, deeply troubling challenges, success breakthroughs, and critical insights.

Sharing these personal stories and so many more is a big part of the solution.

Making these problems visible through real day-to-day experiences, both the hardship and examples of potential paths forward, show us the hopeless reality and the hopeful ways out.

The stories, the realities that each woman faces, are a powerful way to elicit empathy, allow us to understand much more specifically the challenges, and encourage all of us to look deeper at these issues and evolve.

We see two important opportunities for the future here: The first is championing and supporting organizations whose direct mission is to support women. Organizations like Astia, Women 2.0, Vital Voices, the Global Fund for Women, and UP Global are working directly to ensure more women have access to the opportunities they deserve. We both sit on the boards of some of these organizations and are fortunate to witness firsthand how tremendous leadership in action can lead to direct results.

In June 2013, UP Global hosted the Startup Weekend Women’s Edition SF and, with 85 percent women, clocked in with the highest number of women ever at a startup weekend. Many shared how they had long considered participating in a startup weekend event, but once they heard that one was specifically for female entrepreneurs, they jumped at the opportunity and never looked back. UP Global is working on a new initiative with support from Google for Entrepreneurs and Blackstone Foundation called Startup Women, an effort to increase participation of women across UP Global’s programs and help 1,500 women-led startups launch this year.

The second layer is thinking about increasing diversity as a thin underlay across all the work we do globally. We saw this with Manos Accelerator, a new tech accelerator for Latino startup founders; they made a conscious decision to ensure they filled their pipeline with both male and female founders, and subsequently their first class of startups featured five of the seven teams with a female founder. Google for Entrepreneurs launched the global #40Forward effort this year to increase representation of women in forty startup communities with forty partners. Organizations did everything from simply tweak the time of day of their events to launch women-focused accelerators. It’s not just about one organization or one community—the ideas is to shift the way we think about inclusion across the board.

There is enormous potential to tackle the world’s toughest challenges with women and men working together on solutions, tremendous opportunity to improve our communities and our countries and together to elevate our global human condition through entrepreneurship and “10X thinking.” It requires courage, rolling up our sleeves, and moving outside of our comfort zone and our traditional ways of thinking.

Gloria Steinem said, “Don’t think about making women fit the world—think about making the world fit women.” As an industry, we are just at the start of understanding this insight and how we might change and adapt our tech culture to better accommodate so many more innovators. If not now, when?

If not us, who? Take action.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Excerpted from Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya. Copyright 2014 by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya. Excerpted by permission of Diversion Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Data, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and privacy appear in the news nearly a daily. The article, “Privacy, Data Combination, and Why PII Can Be a Red Herring,” caused me to think about how valuable you as a CS teacher can be in helping other teachers, administrators, and school boards in making decisions about the companies and tools being used to store student data…including grades, educational programming labels, subjective assessments, and comments.

You are probably one of the more informed individuals in your school when it comes to understanding data and how it can be analyzed and used. You probably also have a deeper than typical understanding of where data can end up as revealed in the privacy policies of these companies and tools regarding user ownership and control of their data.

I must admit that this article made the hair on the back of neck stand up. I had not thought about many of the implications and possibilities of student data escaping to the wild, nor the not-so-remote possibility that it can happen more easily than we might think.

The author, Bill Fitzgerald, suggests that “we need to start looking at privacy, data collection, the lack of understanding of abusive dynamics, trends of tech and EdTech funding by venture capitalists, as related.” Even though privacy issues can seem overwhelming, as a CS educator not only do you understand data concepts but are able to help others understand the fine print and think about the questions to ask before putting student data in the hands of third party companies. Fitzgerald offers several suggestions for addressing privacy issues:

• We start improving privacy when we call out abusive dynamics online.
• We start improving privacy when we let a vendor know we will not be using their app with students because of their privacy policies.
• We start improving privacy when we talk to our colleagues about how privacy – and respect for student data – informs our tech choices.
• We start improving privacy when we talk to our schools, our school boards, and our elected officials about the ways that current practice needs to improve.

Let us know about your experiences and challenges in protecting student data.

Pat Phillips
Editor, The CSTA Voice