AP reports on the Obama administration’s efforts to promote computer science instruction in high schools, with pilots being taken up in seven states – none of them Maryland.
As we have documented previously, Maryland has in many ways regressed in its offering of this critical STEM area, and certainly offers widely divergent content from county to county, and in fact school to school. A critical reason for this deficiency is absence of state leadership in certification of teachers to meet known baselines of preparation to teach computer science at this level.
More than fifteen years ago we began promoting substantive alignment between the state’s public school and higher education programs, and for a decade worked against steady campus headwinds in order to create a teacher preparation program, yet at virtually the moment this program was approved it was simultaneously fragged by the provost for the convenience of her pet UTeach program. You must do things the UTeach way or not at all, and UTeach has no accommodation for computer science education. For the last year leadership has turned a deaf ear to any request for even a status report on what they might want to start up from scratch in the future. The CS department refused to even list the program in its recent external review of scholarly activity.
The CS Ed program at College Park is dead.
But hey, we got a new building! What a shame that the hucksters still shaking people down to build monuments to themselves aren’t giving the same diligence to our obligation to fill buildings with quality programs which justify the resource taxpayers give us in the first place.