Students of color are left behind in computer science education
Swimming was one of the most-watched events at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Not many viewers were likely to have noted, however, that among the 44 swimmers who represented the United States at the games, just one was African American – the third black to ever make it to the U.S. swimming Olympic squad.
For Jane Margolis, those grim statistics reflect a disturbing parallel in the world of education: Disproportionately few African Americans and Latinos receive undergraduate or advanced degrees in computer science.
A senior researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Margolis specializes in social inequities in computer science education. She is the lead author of a recent book, “Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing,” a pioneering study published by the MIT Press about how students of color receive little or no institutional encouragement and educational support to pursue computer science at the pre-college level.
From 2001 through 2005, Margolis led a team of researchers to three schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District – an overcrowded high school in East L.A. that has an almost entirely Latino/a population; a predominantly African American math and science magnet school in mid-Los Angeles; and a well-funded charter school overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Each of these schools, the researchers conclude, suffers from “virtual segregation.”
According to a 2006 survey cited in the book, just 8 percent of the bachelor’s degrees and 4 percent of the master’s degrees in computer science are awarded to African Americans and Latinos in the nation’s computer science departments that grant Ph.D.s. Among California’s high school students of color, who comprise 49 percent of the state’s high school population, just 9 percent take the advanced placement (AP) computer science test that prepares them for college courses in the field.
“One of our major findings was that there was a large disparity in learning opportunities along racial lines in the schools we studied,” said Margolis. “The students were exposed to the most rudimentary point-and-click computer science amenities and were not dealing with high-end computing that teaches problem solving and logic.”
Nevertheless, the first school, East River High, was touted as a digital success story. Thanks to California’s 1997 Digital High School legislation, it was among numerous high schools in the state that received $1 billion over four years to jumpstart their computer programs. A series of LAUSD promotional videos showcases the school’s technology-rich environment: a digital film-editing lab, a computer-aided design center, a graphics arts class.
And yet, notes Margolis in her book, East River is woefully “curriculum-poor.” The only computer course that meets California’s college preparatory guidelines – AP computer science – has never been taught there. A programming course, the school’s most advanced offering, was taught to just one-third of students – and even that was canceled after two years.
“In fact, ultimately, no East River computing class went beyond cut-and-paste instructions, and despite the glow of technology, there were no classes that introduced the problem-solving and scientific reasoning of computer science to allow students to more fully understand all that the field has to offer,” writes Margolis.
Teaching low-level computing skills rather than computational thinking was also the norm at the magnet school that Margolis and her coauthors studied. And while a relatively wide range of computing-related courses, including AP classes, were taught at the third school in the study, a Santa Monica charter, few students of color were enrolled in them.
Such inadequate learning opportunities were linked to shockingly low expectations that teachers had of students of color. “They don’t have that curiosity” and “they don’t know how to problem-solve” were some of the deplorable comments that the researchers heard about students of color from two white teachers of Internet publishing at East River.
Lack of qualified teachers and the pressure from the federal No Child Left Behind Act to narrow curricula while teaching to the test are two key reasons why students of color generally don’t get beyond the keyboarding, cut-and-paste stage of computing, according to Margolis. The stereotype that only Asian and white males are good at computer science is another reason why students of color feel discouraged from pursuing the discipline.
“The classes do not highlight how engaging and interdisciplinary computer science can be,” said Margolis, pointing out that the discipline is far from insular, encompassing as it does everything from animation to fashion.
“What really stood out for me was that these kids really wanted to learn, but the schools were either so big or had so few courses or counselors,” said Margolis, adding: “This is a disservice to students, especially since this country has been issuing so many policy directives to increase its engineering and computer science talent, which are being undercut at the high school level.”
One immediate solution is to focus on increasing the number of counselors and qualified teachers in schools. As Margolis put it: “Counselors, teachers and peers are all important – often students sign up for courses based on what their friends are taking.”
Clearly, the challenge isn’t solely about integrating another activity such as swimming, tennis or skiing. “Computing is the kind of high-status knowledge that taps a student into the grid of 21st-century opportunities [and] it is tempting to think that it should be free of biases that affect more obviously culturally situated fields like business or law,” writes Margolis. “Nevertheless, few students of color are ‘choosing’ to learn computer science … What is going on here?”
