Class Time Increases In 5 States In Effort To Improve U.S. Public Education

Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.

Five states were to announce Monday that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.

The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools – especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.

A mix of federal, state and district funds will cover the costs of expanded learning time, with the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time & Learning also chipping in resources. In Massachusetts, the program builds on the state's existing expanded-learning program. In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy is hailing it as a natural outgrowth of an education reform law the state passed in May that included about $100 million in new funding, much of it to help the neediest schools.

Spending more time in the classroom, education officials said, will give students access to a more well-rounded curriculum that includes arts and music, individualized help for students who fall behind and opportunities to reinforce critical math and science skills.

"Whether educators have more time to enrich instruction or students have more time to learn how to play an instrument and write computer code, adding meaningful in-school hours is a critical investment that better prepares children to be successful in the 21st century," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement.

The project comes as educators across the U.S. struggle to identify the best ways to strengthen a public education system that many fear has fallen behind other nations. Student testing, teacher evaluations, charter schools and voucher programs join longer school days on the list of reforms that have been put forward with varying degrees of success.

The report from the center, which advocates for extending instruction time, cites research suggesting students who spend more hours learning perform better. One such study, from Harvard economist Roland Fryer, argues that of all the factors affecting educational outcomes, two are the best predictors of success: intensive tutoring and adding at least 300 hours to the standard school calendar.

More classroom time has long been a priority for Duncan, who warned a congressional committee in May 2009 – just months after becoming education secretary – that American students were at a disadvantage compared to their peers in India and China. That same year, he suggested schools should be open six or seven days per week and should run 11 or 12 months out of the year.

But not everyone agrees that shorter school days are to blame. A report last year from the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education disputed the notion that American schools have fallen behind in classroom time, pointing out that students in high-performing countries like South Korea, Finland and Japan actually spend less time in school than most U.S. students.

The broader push to extend classroom time could also run up against concerns from teachers unions. Longer school days became a major sticking point in a seven-day teachers strike in September in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel eventually won an extension of the school day but paid the price in other concessions granted to teachers.

Just over 1,000 U.S. schools already operate on expanded schedules, an increase of 53 percent over 2009, according to a report being released Monday in connection with the announcement by the National Center on Time & Learning. The nonprofit group said more schools should follow suit but stressed that expanded learning time isn't the right strategy for every school.

Some of the funds required to add 300 or more hours to the school calendar will come from shifting resources from existing federal programs, making use of the flexibility granted by waivers to No Child Left Behind. All five states taking part in the initiative have received waivers from the Education Department.

A valid way to use ‘value added’ in teacher evaluation

Whether and how value-added models for teacher evaluation — which use student standardized test scores to assess teachers — only becomes more controversial in education as time goes on. Here is a new approach on the subject from Douglas N. Harris, associate professor of economics and University Endowed Chair in Public Education at Tulane University in New Orleans. His latest book, “Value-Added Measures in Education,” provides an accessible review of the technical and practical issues surrounding these models. This appeared on the blog of the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute. 

Now that the election is over, the Obama administration and policymakers nationally can return to governing.  Of all the education-related decisions that have to be made, the future of teacher evaluation has to be front and center.

In particular, how should “value-added” measures be used in teacher evaluation? President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative expanded the use of these measures, which attempt to identify how much each teacher contributes to student test scores. In doing so, the initiative embraced and expanded the controversial reliance on standardized tests that started under President Bush’s No Child Left Behind.

In many respects, The Race was well designed. It addresses an important problem – the vast majority of teachers report receiving limited quality feedback on instruction. As a competitive grants program, it was voluntary for states to participate (though involuntary for many districts within those states). The administration also smartly embraced the idea of multiple measures of teacher performance.

But they also made one decision that I think was a mistake.  They encouraged—or required, depending on your vantage point—states to lump value-added or other growth model estimates together with other measures. The raging debate since then has been over what percentage of teachers’ final ratings should be given to value-added versus the other measures. I believe there is a better way to approach this issue, one that focuses on teacher evaluations not as a measure, but rather as a process.

The idea of combining the measures has some advantages.  For example, as I wrote in mybook on about value-added measures, combined measures have greater reliability and probably better validity as well.  But there is also one major issue: Teachers by and large do not like or trust value-added measures. There are some good reasons for this: The measures are not very reliable and therefore bounce around from year to year in ways that have nothing to do with actual performance. There is more debate about whether the measures are, in any given year, providing useful information about “true” teacher performance (i.e., whether they are valid).

The larger problem is that policymakers have tended to look at the teacher evaluation problem like measurement experts rather than school leaders. Measurement experts naturally want validity and reliable measures—ones that accurately capture teacher effectiveness. School leaders, on the other hand, can and should be more concerned about whether the entire process leads to valid and reliable conclusions about teacher effectiveness. The process includes measures, but also clear steps, checks and balances, and opportunities to identify and fix evaluation mistakes. It is that process, perhaps as much as the measures themselves, that instills trust in the system among educators. But the idea of combining multiple measures has short-circuited discussion about how the multiple measures—and especially value-added—could be used to create a better process.

One possible process comes from the medical profession. It is common for doctors to “screen” for major diseases, using procedures that can identify all the people who do have the disease, but some who do not (the latter being false positives). Those who are positive on the screening test are given another “gold standard” test that is more expensive but almost perfectly accurate.  They do not average the screening test together with the gold standard test to create a combined index. Instead, the two pieces are considered in sequence.

Ineffective teachers could be identified the same way.

Value-added measures could become the educational equivalent of screening tests. They are generally inexpensive and somewhat inaccurate. As in medicine, a value-added score, combined with some additional information, should lead us to engage in additional classroom observations to identify truly low-performing teachers and to provide feedback to help those teachers improve. If all else fails, within a reasonable amount of time, after continued observation, administrators could counsel the teacher out or pursue a formal dismissal procedure.

The most obvious problem with this approach is that value-added measures, unlike the medical screening tests, do not capture all potential low-performers.  They are statistically noisy, for example, and so many low-performers will get high scores by chance.  For this reason, value-added would not be the sole screener.  Instead, some other measure could also be used as a screener.  If teachers failed on either measure, then that would be a reason for collecting additional information. (This approach also solves another problem discussed later.)

There is a second way in which value-added could be used as a screener – not of teachers, but of their teacher evaluators. To explain how, I need to say more about the “other” measures in an evaluation system. Almost every school system that has moved to alternative teacher evaluations has chosen to also use classroom observations by peers, master teachers, and/or school principals. The Danielson Framework, PLATO, and others are now household names among educators. Classroom observations have many advantages: They allow the observer to take account of the local context. They yield information that is more useful to teachers for improving practice.  And we can increase their reliability by observing teachers more often.

The difficulty is that these measures, too, have validity and reliability issues.  Two observers can look at the same classroom and see different things.  That problem is more likely when the observers vary in their training. Also, some observers might know teachers’ value-added scores and let those color their views during the observations – they might think, “I already know this teacher is not very good so I will give her a low score.”

Value-added measures might actually be used to fix these problems with classroom observations. To see how, note that researchers have found consistent, positive correlations between value-added and classroom observations scores. They are far from perfect correlations (mainly because of statistical noise), but they provide a benchmark against which we can compare (validate, if you will) the scores across individual observers.  Inaccurate classroom observation scores would likely show up as low correlations with value-added. Conversely, if observers were having their scores influenced by value-added, then the correlations might be very high, which might also be a red flag.

In these cases, an additional observer might be used to make sure the information is accurate. In other words, value-added can screen the performance of not only teachers, but observers as well. Used in these ways, value-added would be a key part of the system but without being the determining factor in personnel decisions.

Op-ed: Old-school job skills you won’t find on Google

IN October, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made headlines with his pronouncement for fast-forwarding learning in America’s classrooms.

By putting a keyboard in every student’s hands and replacing printed textbooks with digital ones, Duncan predicted that U.S. graduates would become formidable competitors against their digital-savvy counterparts from countries like South Korea.

But what really happens when the Google Generation joins the workplace? While we agree much stands to be gained, what may be lost as education goes digital?

Our research tells us the razzle-dazzle of all that techno-mastery masks some deep and troubling deficiencies.

For instance, deep reading and retention are most at risk when books are replaced with online texts, according to the Director of Tufts University’s Center for Reading and Language Research, Maryanne Wolf.

And even though three-quarters of the teachers surveyed recently by Pew’s Internet & American Life Project reported that digital technologies have a positive effect on learning, more than half of them said online learning does more to distract students than it does to help them master academic concepts.

Findings from our recent federal study at Project Information Literacy (PIL), conducted in collaboration with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the University of Washington’s Information School, add another dimension to the digital learning debate — a cautionary tale.

When we did in-depth phone interviews with 23 U.S. employers at Microsoft, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, KPMG, the FBI, the Smithsonian and other organizations, we found that bright new hires dazzle interviewers with their digital skills.

Once they were on the job, however, it became apparent that today’s graduates lacked essential low-tech, traditional research skills like popping into a co-worker’s office for help in interpreting results or scouring printed reports that were sitting on a shelf.

Employers were dismayed to find that most of these college hires were tethered to their computers. They rarely went beyond a Google search and the first page of results looking for “the” answer to a workplace problem.

“Going through old records and stacks of paper, they don’t have enough patience to do that, to be able to decipher information out of an old book isn’t there,” said one employer, “but to find it on the Internet, find it on a website — it’s quick, it’s instantaneous, it’s already put into a synopsis for them when they bring it up.”

Our findings underscore the growing mismatch between what employers expect and need from college hires and what many of today’s graduates actually deliver.

Moreover, they confirm a new instinct for “instant information” among the digital generation. Yet these online searching techniques are simply not enough.

As we face the challenges of educating today’s students, we need to recognize that not all learning solutions are found online — and never will be.

In the race to bring ever more technology into the classroom we need to dial back and make sure students are also being taught old-school methods of communication and research that were second nature to previous generations.

Young people who are more comfortable texting than talking need to understand the value of conversation, whether by telephone or over the wall of a cubicle.

A conscious effort must also be made to introduce so-called “screen-agers” to the printed word, not out of some nostalgia for paper but because much pertinent and important information is still bound between covers.

A previous study by Project Information Literacy surveying 8,353 students from 25 campuses across the country, including the University of Washington, found that less than half had ever pulled a book from the library stacks or consulted a campus librarian when working on research papers.

We need to train students who consider all of the possible answers — not what comes up first in an online search that may call up dozens, hundreds or even thousands of results.

Such skills will go a long way to make graduates career-ready and the U.S. competitive in the 21st century. Or, as one employer we interviewed said, “those hires that are the most successful are the ones who can find that balance between the computing workplace and the person-to-person workplace.”

Alison J. Head is the founder and director of Project Information Literacy, an ongoing, national study about how college students find and use information in the digital age. She is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate associate professor in the University of Washington’s Information School. The Institute of Museum and Libraries Services funded Project Information Literacy’s federal study, “Learning Curve: How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace.”

Could Competency-Based Learning Save the Common Core?

After spending last week in Washington, D.C., I was struck by how nervous folks in education circles are about whether states will stick with the Common Core state standards once the Common Core assessments arrive in the 2014-15 school year.

The behind-the-scenes buzz on Common Core touched on everything from how different the assessments really will be from what some states have today to whether Common Core will doom testing and the accountability movement more generally because of the length of the assessments to whether governors will stick with Common Core once the first year of assessment results come out and people see how students perform poorly on them.

I’m a proponent of states adopting Common Core state standards that are fewer, clearer, and higher in part because of the innovation their adoption could seed through the creation of a common market. Having common standards across the country could begin to reward content providers that target the long tail of learners because they would help to aggregate demand across the country, as opposed to what happens today where those providers that tailor their offerings to different and idiosyncratic state standards, for example, are rewarded.

What has struck me though is how after having agreed upon the standards, we seem to be going about the work of implementing the assessments for them backwards. I’m certainly no expert in this and this is genuinely complicated, but a story from Steve Spear’s research, as recounted in his book Chasing the Rabbit and which we wrote about in Disrupting Class, frames the point and my ultimate question.

While a doctoral student, Steve took temporary jobs working first on an assembly line at one of the Detroit Big Three plants and then at Toyota at the passenger-side front seat installation point.

In Detroit, the worker doing the training essentially told Steve, “The cars come down this line every 58 seconds, so that’s how long you have to install this seat. Now I’m going to show you how to do it. First, you do this. Then do that, then click this in here just like this, then tighten this, then do that,” and so on, until the seat was completely installed. “Do you get how to do it, Steve?”

Steve thought he could do each of those things in the allotted time. When the next car arrived, he picked up the seat and did each of the preparatory steps. But when he tried to install it in the car, it wouldn’t fit. For the entire 58 seconds he tried to complete the installation but couldn’t. His trainer stopped the assembly line to fix the problem. He again showed Steve how to do it. When the next car arrived, Steve tried again but didn’t get it right. In an entire hour, he installed only four seats correctly.

One reason why it historically was so important to test every product when it came off the end of a production line like the Detroit Big Three’s was that there were typically hundreds of steps involved in making a product, and the company could not be sure that each step had been done correctly. In business, we call that end-of-the-line activity “inspection.” In education, we call it “summative assessment.”

When Steve went to work at the same station in Toyota’s plant, he had a completely different experience. First, he went to a training station where he was told, “These are the seven steps required to install this seat successfully. You don’t have the privilege of learning step 2 until you’ve demonstrated mastery of step 1. If you master step 1 in a minute, you can begin learning step 2 a minute from now. If step 1 takes you an hour, then you can learn step 2 in an hour. And if it takes you a day, then you can learn step 2 tomorrow. It makes no sense for us to teach you subsequent steps if you can’t do the prior ones correctly.”

Testing and assessment were still vital, but they were an integral part of the process of instruction. As a result, when he took his spot on Toyota’s production line, Steve was able to do his part right the first time and every time. Toyota had built into its process a mechanism to verify immediately that each step had been done correctly so that no time or money would be wasted fixing a defective product. As a result, it did not have to test its products when they came to the end of the production process.

That’s quite a contrast between the two methods for training Steve Spear. At the Detroit Big Three plant, the time was fixed, but the result of training was variable and unpredictable. The “exam”— installing the seat—came at the end of Steve’s training.

At Toyota, the training time was variable. But assessment was interdependently woven into content delivery, and the result was fixed; every person who went through the training could predictably do what he had been taught to do.

The Detroit example represents how America’s factory-model public schools operate. They were in fact modeled upon factories built during the industrial revolution. The Toyota example illustrates more how a competency-based learning system would work. As I’ve written numerous times, this is how our education system should operate. Many psychometricians say that assessments can either drive instruction or be used for accountability but not both; the Toyota experience suggests otherwise if the assessments are implemented in a competency-based learning system in which time is variable and learning is fixed.

Consider now how we are implementing the Common Core assessments: summative assessments to measure what percentage of students failed. In essence, we are using them as an autopsy. This approach is, of course, an outgrowth of our factory-model system, which requires this sort of assessment; it is not an indictment against the assessment consortia per se. It is also arguably enshrined in federal law, as the Elementary Secondary Education Act requires that states implement yearly assessments, for example. But with the Detroit-Toyota story as background, let’s think about the three specific worries mentioned earlier: whether the new tests will be truly different; whether they will doom the accountability movement because of their length; and whether the states will stick with them after the first year of results. Would competency-based learning help to alleviate each of these concerns?

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia’s announcement that it is scaling back the performance items on its test adds fuel to the fire on the first concern, but at the same time David Coleman, a key thought leader behind the Common Core, and others on a panel at former Governor Jeb Bush’s National Summit on Education Reform went to great lengths to assure folks that the assessments truly would be different.

Of course, if there were instead systems of assessments in a competency-based learning system built for students to take an assessment on-demand when they were ready to demonstrate mastery on specific competencies, we would see a different picture develop with assessments that left no doubt that they were different. Perhaps there could be short assessments to verify basic objective mastery around a particular concept followed by rich capstone-like projects that could measure several competencies and be reviewed on an on-demand basis by an outside party, similar in some respects to how Western Governors University manages its assessments, for example (and yes, Western Governors’ assessments are designed by psychometricians).

The assessments could also presumably be more bite-sized and not interrupt learning in school for several days. As Education Week reported, “A key push in the latest redesign was to ensure that the test yields enough detailed information to enable reports on student performance in specific areas of math and English/language arts.” That’s in part because the assessments have to form an approximate measure of an entire year of curriculum. The summative test therefore has to be a certain length so that it can collect such statistically valid information. Smarter Balanced’s assessment, for example, will be roughly 6.5 to 8 hours long.

What’s most stunning about this test length is that this was a decrease in time from the length the test was supposed to be, according to this announcement. I don’t know if this tone-deaf length will doom the accountability movement more generally, as some worried in private in Washington, D.C., but I will also understand the complaints of parents if this goes forward.

As to the last question over whether governors will stick with Common Core after the first year of assessment results, we don’t really know. Many are speculating that on the heels of students’ and schools’ disastrous results on the assessments, states will simply “lower the cut scores” that determine proficiency, thereby masking the actual results and avoiding the political heat. That would hardly align to Common Core’s mantra of fewer, clearer, and higher, however. Others speculate that governors will just walk rather than deal with the continued expense and political headaches.

If we were instead using assessments in a competency-based learning system, however, then the equation would change. The learning objectives and assessments would be far more transparent to students and their parents, and they would understand why they had not passed a certain concept, as they could receive immediate feedback to inform what they would learn next—and understand the importance of true mastery. In many cases, students could move back down to an earlier concept from a previous “grade” that they might not have mastered if that made the most sense for them to move ahead ultimately and realize success, thereby avoiding the “Swiss Cheese” problem that is too prevalent in education today and that competency-based learning, such as that used in Toyota’s training, solves.

For those worried about accountability (and count me in that group), this would actually allow for a far more accountable and rigorous system, as we could have near real-time data about where each student was in her learning (and with much more visibility into where each student actually was because we would be testing students based on their actual level, not an assumed one based on their age) and see the progress and growth that a school was achieving with its population with a bottoms-up approach rather than today’s clunky top-down one.

We wouldn’t need to play all the games that we do today with summative assessments where we are constantly making difficult tradeoffs and relying on various statistical machinations to create valid and reliable instruments. Instead, the focus would be on true mastery, not “good enough” (to see why that’s a valid concern, check out Sal Khan’s chapter on testing in his book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined).

To the credit of David Coleman and Dr. William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University and another of the key thought leaders behind the Common Core, at Bush’s summit they spoke about how Common Core could unleash competency-based learning. Indeed, Common Core and competency-based learning should be a natural fit, as the former creates learning maps for students to master that can shift the emphasis from time to mastery of deeper learning. Coleman and Schmidt also properly warned about the possibility that competency-based learning might mean students just zipping past concepts without truly mastering them (Tom Vander Ark has written about this concern more here).

At the same time, one of the things that has concerned me most about the Common Core is its language around age-based grades that imply the same factory model we’ve always had. At Bush’s summit, prior to someone asking about competency-based learning, Schmidt reinforced this worry when he in essence said that students should be working on the same things on the same day at the same age, and that it makes no sense for it to be otherwise because it’s not equitable.

I’m all for all students having an equal opportunity to be exposed to and master the same foundational concepts, as opposed to the way today’s system works (and by the way, the adoption of digital learning would go a long way in helping solve this), but at the same time, this mindset of age-based grades is dangerous and a terrible relic of today’s factory-model system that is anything but equitable. It helps keep a deeply flawed and inequitable system locked in place, which is why a couple hundred education leaders joined me in the summer of 2011 to encourage the development of a different view of assessments entirely (you can read the open letter here). What’s more, sticking to age-based grade bands could be Common Core’s undoing.

Common Core creates a huge opportunity for innovation and personalization and the implementation of a competency-based learning system. It’s an opportunity we shouldn’t waste. With the way things are moving now on the assessment front, however, there are real concerns that states will walk away from it en masse. Even if they don’t, there are real concerns that the assessments that will be put in place will stunt innovation and educational transformation, not encourage it. If we called a timeout though and shifted our mindset and our education system to a competency-based learning one—one in which new assessments could help drive the shift—might we see a different picture develop? Wouldn’t we worry less about states walking away from the Common Core in that picture?

Fostering Tech Talent in Schools

Leandre Nsabi, a senior at Rainier Beach High School here, received some bluntly practical advice from an instructor recently.

“My teacher said there’s a lot of money to be made in computer science,” Leandre said. “It could be really helpful in the future.”

That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the subject. When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft. He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science, so they go on to pursue careers in the field.

In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates — one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation’s economy.

There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. But despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, fewer than 40,000 American students received bachelor’s degrees in computer science during 2010, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates. And the wider job market remains weak.

“People can’t get jobs, and we have jobs that can’t be filled,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview.

Big technology companies have complained for years about a dearth of technical talent, a problem they have tried to solve by lobbying for looser immigration rules to accommodate more foreign engineers and sponsoring tech competitions to encourage student interest in the industry. Google, for one, holds a programming summer camp for incoming ninth graders and underwrites an effort called CS4HS, in which high school teachers sharpen their computer science skills in workshops at local universities.

But Microsoft is sending its employees to the front lines, encouraging them to commit to teaching a high school computer science class for a full school year. Its engineers, who earn a small stipend for their classroom time, are in at least two hourlong classes a week and sometimes as many as five. Schools arrange the classes for first thing in the day to avoid interfering with the schedules of the engineers, who often do not arrive at Microsoft until the late morning.

The program started as a grass-roots effort by Kevin Wang, a Microsoft engineer with a master’s degree in education from Harvard.

In 2009, he began volunteering as a computer science teacher at a Seattle public high school on his way to work. After executives at Microsoft caught wind of what he was doing, they put financial support behind the effort — which is known as Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, or Teals — and let Mr. Wang run it full time.

The program is now in 22 schools in the Seattle area and has expanded to more than a dozen other schools in Washington, Utah, North Dakota, California and other states this academic year. Microsoft wants other big technology companies to back the effort so it can broaden the number of outside engineers involved.

This year, only 19 of the 110 teachers in the program are not Microsoft employees. In some cases, the program has thrown together volunteers from companies that spend a lot of their time beating each other up in the marketplace.

“I think education and bringing more people into the field is something all technology companies agree on,” said Alyssa Caulley, a Google software engineer, who, along with a Microsoft volunteer, is teaching a computer science class at Woodside High School in Woodside, Calif.

While computer science can be an intimidating subject, Microsoft has sought to connect it to the technologies most students use in their everyday lives. At Rainier Beach High recently, Peli de Halleux, a Microsoft software engineer, taught a class on making software for mobile phones.

The students buried their faces in the phones, supplied by Microsoft. They were asked to create programs that performed simple functions, like playing a random song when the phones were shaken.

Leandre, who took Mr. de Halleux’s mobile programming class last year and is in Mr. Edouard’s Advanced Placement computer science class this year, proudly showed off a simple game he had created, Sun Collector, in which players tilt the phone to dodge black balls and hit big yellow ones.

“I never really understood what was behind these games,” he said. “Once you start getting it, it’s pretty easy to understand.”

One of the most alarming trends for the technology industry has been students’ declining interest in computer science over the last decade.

While the number of bachelor’s degrees granted in computer science has been growing for the last several years, 2010’s figure, the most recent available, was still 33 percent lower than at the peak in 2004, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Student interest in the field began to fade after the dot-com implosion a decade ago. It has picked up again in recent years, but slowly.

Most educators believe that for students to be excited about computer science, it is critical to introduce them to it at an early age. Yet support for the subject at cash-short K-12 schools has faded. In almost every state, computer science is taught as an elective, rather than a core requirement.

The percentage of graduates who earned credits in high school computer science classes fell to 19 percent in 2009 from 25 percent in 1990, making it the only subject among science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses to experience such a drop, according to a report by the Education Department.

Those numbers are all the more surprising considering how attached teenagers are to their smartphones, tablet computers and Facebook accounts. But that fascination in most cases is with social communications and media, rather than the technology itself. Today’s easy-to-use gadgets have also concealed programming tools from users that were once far more prominent in computers.

Finding capable computer science teachers is also hard. Few other industries are as good as the technology business in its ability to divert would-be educators into far more lucrative corporate jobs. Mr. Edouard graduated from the University of Florida in 2011 and considered enlisting in Teach for America, but he also had multiple offers from technology employers.

“In today’s day and age, with so many college loans, it’s tough to go into teaching,” he said.

One of the biggest concerns about Microsoft’s effort is that most of its volunteers have little teaching experience. To comply with district licensing requirements and to help engineers with classroom challenges like managing unruly teenagers, a professional teacher is also in the room during lessons. One of the program’s tenets is that Microsoft engineers need to teach the teachers, alongside students, so that those instructors can eventually run an engaging computer science class on their own.

“We are taking the kids farther than I could do,” said Michael Braun, a teacher at Rainier Beach High who is working with Microsoft volunteers.

There are still hiccups, including tensions between some of the professional teachers and the Microsoft engineers assigned to work with them, according to several people involved in the program, who did not want to be named for fear of seeming critical of Microsoft.

Sarah Filman, a program manager at Microsoft, completed the intensive summer training that the company offers volunteers, preparing a lengthy PowerPoint presentation for the class she taught at a Seattle high school last year. “That’s the Microsoft way,” she said.

But as soon as she dimmed the lights in her classroom at the start of the year, her students had trouble focusing on the slide show, forcing Ms. Filman to change her methods. “I had to throw away a lot of what I had done,” she said.

For students in the Seattle area, Microsoft tries to drum up excitement in technology by organizing field trips to its campus and discussing the lucrative careers that await them. The students from Rainier Beach High who visited Microsoft last year were buzzing about their trips for days afterward.

“To me, that was an ‘aha’ moment,” said Dwane Chappelle, the principal of Rainier Beach High. “I said, we’ve got to find a way to get more kids involved.”

Mr. Wang, the program’s founder, said a professional from the tech industry who stands at the head of a class for a full year can be a powerful role model. “Kids can see themselves in their shoes,” Mr. Wang said. After all, he added, “their chances of going to college and majoring in computer science are exponentially better than getting into the N.F.L.”

Is the next second language JavaScript?

Computer programming has never been taught as a core subject in schools, but perhaps it should be.

Computer programming has never been taught as a core subject in schools, but perhaps it should be.

It's true that our children will never use JavaScript to chat with foreign strangers on trains in exotic locales, but "JS" — the computer programming language dominant in developing web pages and mobile apps — may be the most important second language your child will ever learn. According to a growing number of experts, learning computer science will not only pave the way for future employment prospects — job growth in this sector is booming — but contribute to the U.S. economic recovery as well.

Alas, there's no guarantee that computer science will be offered at your child's school; in fact, there's a good chance it isn't. Despite the chorus of future-focused experts advocating for better computer science education in our K-12 schools, many schools aren't meeting the challenge.

The U.S. may be the birthplace of IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and umpteen other computer science-inspired giants, but in the past two decades we’ve fallen behind other countries when it comes to pumping out trained computer scientists. American universities still boast some of the best science and engineering graduate programs, yet many of those spots are filled by foreign students. According to the 2006 Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering, the number of foreign graduate students enrolled in science and engineering fields increased by 45 percent between 1996 and 2006, while enrollment for U.S. citizens/residents increased only 8 percent.

"We are not preparing our students out of high school to compete in the area of science and engineering very well," explained John Borrelli, dean of the Texas Tech University graduate school.

What’s next — kinder code?

Doug Rushkoff, CNN columnist and author of Program or Be Programmed, is one of the nation’s leading digital crusaders. He argues that our schools need to incorporate computer programming into our core curriculum or get left behind. "It's time Americans begin treating computer code the way we do the alphabet or arithmetic,” he writes. According to Rushkoff, there is such a dearth of skilled programmers in the U.S. that firms like Google and Facebook buy entire companies, simply to gain access to their code-literate employees. “If you know how to code, you can likely get a high-paying job right now,” writes Rushkoff. “You will be enabling America to compete effectively on both the economic and military frontiers, where we are rapidly losing our competitive advantage due to our failure to teach ourselves code…"

Making sure our kids learn code isn't just smart career planning, Rushkoff contends, it's practically a patriotic duty.

Decline of CS in HS

How far are we behind? It’s hard to say. A recent poll of 18 nations by the Paris-based OECD Programme for International Assessment (PISA) gave the #1 ranking in digital literacy to South Korea, with New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong close behind. The U.S. wasn't tested, but Ron Anderson, professor of the Sociology of Technology at University of Minnesota, estimates that the USA, "probably would have performed in the middle third of the countries… But we will never know [because] the last student assessment of digital literacy involving American students was in 1992."

If we can’t determine our student’s digital literacy skills as compared to other countries, there are few signs we are trying to improve our standing. The number of CS classes offered in American high schools has declined in recent years. A 2009 survey by the Computer Science Teacher's Association reports in The Journalthat the percentage of high schools offering CS classes dropped from 78 percent in 2005 to 65 percent in 2009, while the percentage of AP computer classes fell from 40 percent in 2005 to 27 percent in 2009. The Journal lists multiple excuses for CS classes disappearing (none of them reassuring): a lack of teacher subject knowledge, difficult subject matter, lack of student interest, a lack of staff support.

Mark Guzdial, professor in the school of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology observed that because of bureaucratic rules and technological limitations that "learning computing in USA high schools is like learning programming in the developing world."

Times they are a’coding?

America may be waking up from its CS slumber. Codecademy, a website launched in August 2011 that offers free "coding" tutorials, has already been used by millions of code-hungry visitors. On January 5, 2012 New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted his New Year's resolution to learn programming. On January 17, CNN columnist Doug Rushkoff presented his essay, "Why I Am Learning To Code and You Should Too."

But getting your future code geek enrolled in computer science classes may require some effort. There are public high schools which offer excellent programs. Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland has a team that's a frequent champion at the American Computer Science League contests. Other top contenders include Cary Academy in North Carolina, Tacoma Park Middle School in Maryland, and Jefferson Sci-Tech in Virginia.

If you dwell in the Big Apple, and your teen wants to pursue the mayor's new hobby, the best bet could be the Computer Science Institute at John Dewey High School. This rigorous program requires a longer school day for extra classes, and awards graduates Microsoft Office Systems certification.

But even if your child’s high school doesn't offer any CS classes, you can still help your son or daughter learn what some have dubbed an essential 21st century skill. In addition to Codecademy, Khan Academy has plans to offer CS training. For more immersive experiences you can choose from one of InternalDrive.com's140 "tech camps" for kids 7 to 18 years old. If these tuition prices are beyond your budget, perhaps they can qualify for "Code Summer Plus" — a condensed version of Codecademy's curriculum that is part of President Obama's Summer Jobs Plus Initiative.

No matter how you do it, keep the ultimate goal in mind: your child’s future opportunities. How bright are the chances of future employment for CS specialists? A Georgetown University study estimates that from 2005-2018 there will be a 2.2 - 2.6% annual employment increase in computer and mathematical science occupations, with 700,000 of the 800,000 new jobs occupied by computer specialists. Many of these jobs will bring considerable rewards. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "In May 2008, median annual wages of computer systems software engineers were $92,430." Be aware though — the number of "programming-only" jobs will decline, largely due to increased use of software interfaces. Explosive growth is in other computer fields — especially apps development. The smartphone industry has created almost 466,000 jobs since 2007, generating $20 billion in 2011 alone.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that not every child has what it takes to be a computer scientist. Not only are strong problem-solving and analytical skills essential, but it also helps to be detail-oriented, and to have a crackerjack memory. So before you engineer an education makeover for your child, make sure your child is as excited by the prospect as you are.

How far are we behind? It’s hard to say. A recent poll of 18 nations by the Paris-based OECD Programme for International Assessment (PISA) gave the #1 ranking in digital literacy to South Korea, with New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong close behind. The U.S. wasn't tested, but Ron Anderson, professor of the Sociology of Technology at University of Minnesota, estimates that the USA, "probably would have performed in the middle third of the countries… But we will never know [because] the last student assessment of digital literacy involving American students was in 1992."

If we can’t determine our student’s digital literacy skills as compared to other countries, there are few signs we are trying to improve our standing. The number of CS classes offered in American high schools has declined in recent years. A 2009 survey by the Computer Science Teacher's Association reports in The Journalthat the percentage of high schools offering CS classes dropped from 78 percent in 2005 to 65 percent in 2009, while the percentage of AP computer classes fell from 40 percent in 2005 to 27 percent in 2009. The Journal lists multiple excuses for CS classes disappearing (none of them reassuring): a lack of teacher subject knowledge, difficult subject matter, lack of student interest, a lack of staff support.

Mark Guzdial, professor in the school of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology observed that because of bureaucratic rules and technological limitations that "learning computing in USA high schools is like learning programming in the developing world."

Times they are a’coding?

America may be waking up from its CS slumber. Codecademy, a website launched in August 2011 that offers free "coding" tutorials, has already been used by millions of code-hungry visitors. On January 5, 2012 New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted his New Year's resolution to learn programming. On January 17, CNN columnist Doug Rushkoff presented his essay, "Why I Am Learning To Code and You Should Too."

But getting your future code geek enrolled in computer science classes may require some effort. There are public high schools which offer excellent programs. Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland has a team that's a frequent champion at the American Computer Science League contests. Other top contenders include Cary Academy in North Carolina, Tacoma Park Middle School in Maryland, and Jefferson Sci-Tech in Virginia.

If you dwell in the Big Apple, and your teen wants to pursue the mayor's new hobby, the best bet could be the Computer Science Institute at John Dewey High School. This rigorous program requires a longer school day for extra classes, and awards graduates Microsoft Office Systems certification.

But even if your child’s high school doesn't offer any CS classes, you can still help your son or daughter learn what some have dubbed an essential 21st century skill. In addition to Codecademy, Khan Academy has plans to offer CS training. For more immersive experiences you can choose from one of InternalDrive.com's140 "tech camps" for kids 7 to 18 years old. If these tuition prices are beyond your budget, perhaps they can qualify for "Code Summer Plus" — a condensed version of Codecademy's curriculum that is part of President Obama's Summer Jobs Plus Initiative.

No matter how you do it, keep the ultimate goal in mind: your child’s future opportunities. How bright are the chances of future employment for CS specialists? A Georgetown University study estimates that from 2005-2018 there will be a 2.2 - 2.6% annual employment increase in computer and mathematical science occupations, with 700,000 of the 800,000 new jobs occupied by computer specialists. Many of these jobs will bring considerable rewards. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "In May 2008, median annual wages of computer systems software engineers were $92,430." Be aware though — the number of "programming-only" jobs will decline, largely due to increased use of software interfaces. Explosive growth is in other computer fields — especially apps development. The smartphone industry has created almost 466,000 jobs since 2007, generating $20 billion in 2011 alone.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that not every child has what it takes to be a computer scientist. Not only are strong problem-solving and analytical skills essential, but it also helps to be detail-oriented, and to have a crackerjack memory. So before you engineer an education makeover for your child, make sure your child is as excited by the prospect as you are.

Gates: Test scores not enough for teacher reviews

After three years of research on measuring teacher performance, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Tuesday that it takes multiple measures to most accurately judge educators.

After three years of research on measuring teacher performance, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Tuesday that it takes multiple measures to most accurately judge educators.

The Seattle foundation concluded in its final report on its Measures of Effective Teaching research that test scores or principal evaluations are not enough on their own. The findings mirror what teachers unions have been saying.

The federal government has been pushing states through incentive grants and waivers to update their teacher evaluation systems because it felt existing systems were inadequate. At the same time, the Gates Foundation was studying these issues, saying it wanted to add to the discussion. Most states and big city districts have adopted some elements of the recommendations.

Foundation officials say the more reliable systems include a balanced mix of evaluation methods: student test scores, lesson observation and student surveys.

"If you do it right, you can generate measures that will help identify teachers that are having a bigger impact. That's a really big deal," said lead investigator Thomas J. Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The foundation studied 3,000 teachers across the country. The research included classroom videos of 13,000 lessons, interviews with students and administrators, test scores and experiments to test theories.

Classrooms were studied in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the Dallas Independent School District, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., Memphis City Schools, The New York City Department of Education and Pittsburgh Public Schools.

One of the new conclusions of the report is that having a second person, other than the principal, evaluate a teacher greatly enhances reliability.

The researchers also established a baseline for how much influence test scores should have on teacher evaluations, saying tests should not represent more than half the total teacher evaluation score, unless the district is just trying to determine future test scores.

Vicki Phillips, director of the foundation's K-12 education program, said the focus of teacher evaluation systems should be on giving feedback to help teachers improve.

Several districts involved in the research acknowledged that student surveys were the most controversial part of the process, and some, like Hillsboro County Public Schools in Florida, have opted to leave them out of the mix when scoring teachers.

Jean Clements, president of the Hillsboro Classroom Teachers Association, said her district decided the results of student surveys, which ask questions like "do you feel challenged to do your best work," may not be trusted by teachers.

The researchers found, however, that student surveys help teachers improve their practice because those results evoke the most emotions.

Test scores and principal evaluations don't bring tears to many teachers' eyes, Kane said. "Getting these student surveys back ... hits you where your heart is."