Soon, more students in the high school will be learning to code.
Starting with next year’s freshman high school class, taking a year of computer science will be required, said Christina Smith, the district’s supervisor of science technology and engineering for grades 5-12.
“We are preparing our kids for their real lives after school,” she said.
Not all districts in the state require a course to graduate.
While the commonwealth does have framework for computer science and digital literacy education, there’s no state requirement to teach computer science in K-12 schools, according to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The percentage of K-12 students in each district who have taken a computer science course ranges from about 80 percent to zero, according to DESE data.
Some groups are trying to change that.
Schools offerings are “all over the place,” said Shaileen Crawford, executive director of CSforMA, a nonprofit agency that works on educator professional development and aims to help schools increase their computer science class offerings.
In fact, Crawford’s agency would like to see computer science be a statewide high school graduation requirement.
Massachusetts is above the national average for percentage of high school students who have taken a computer science course, but not in the top 10, according to a report from the Code.org Advocacy Coalition.
With a top-notch education system and as a hub for the tech industry, the commonwealth should have better computer science education, Crawford said.
Even with artificial intelligence increasingly being able to write code, Crawford still sees it as a useful area of study.
“People still need and deserve a basic understanding of how it works underneath. Just like we still teach calculus and basic arithmetic, even though we have calculators,” she said. “We will always need people who know how to open it up and build new models.”
A state-commissioned report from SageFox Consulting Group, of Amherst, and CSforMA, of Marshfield, looked at the possibility of making a computer science course a high school graduation requirement. The 2024 report recommended that the Legislature fund an initiative to make it so, as well as train educators in the subject.
Across the state, urban high schools, which often serve more low-income and students of color, were less likely to teach a class in computer science than their rural and suburban counterparts, according to a 2021 analysis done for the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.
“There’s an equity issue here, as well,” said Ed Lambert, the executive director of the alliance.
And those who do take courses in the state tend to skew white and male, state data shows.
Expanding access to computer science education could help address wealth gaps in the state, Lambert said.
MORE COURSES NEEDED FOR TEACHERS
Lambert hopes to see more teacher training for the courses in the state. “We’re denying kids based on the high school they go to if we don’t do more to accelerate that,” he said.
AI has disrupted the field, too, but like Crawford, Lambert still sees value in technical education.
“Things are changing pretty rapidly, but nonetheless we still see an incredible need to ramp up the number of students in STEM fields in computer science, in tech and AI. ... There simply isn’t enough of that happening for students.”
In Westfield, 66 percent of students have taken either a digital literacy or computer science course as of last school year, according to state data. Springfield Public Schools’ figure was close to 50 percent, and Holyoke was at 52 percent.
At Holyoke Public Schools, courses tend to be blended computer science and digital literacy. Holyoke High School North offers pre-engineering classes, for example, and the Dr. Marcella R. Kelly School teaches coding to its elementary grades, according to HPS Executive Director of Academics Rebecca Thompson.
At Westfield schools, educators are seeing a lot of interest in coding from students, said Lindsey Ayers, an elementary school STEM coach in the district.
They are drawn to platforms like Scratch, an educational coding tool for elementary school students, she said.
“Kids want to do it,” she said. “They are coding at home.”
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