Friday, December 13, 2024
December 9-15, 2024 was declared by the DPI as Computer Science Education Week in the state of Wisconsin. Dr. Jill Underly, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, delivered these remarks to the CSforALL Summit, which drew almost 500 participants from around the country to Milwaukee in late October.
I want to talk with you briefly today about Wisconsin’s approach to computer science in our schools and how we’ve been able to engage administrators, educators, students, and communities in being advocates for computer science in our schools.
However I wanted to start off by saying that, standing up here, I feel like I am one of you. From a young age, I was captivated by computers. Whether it was playing with the Apple IIE computer my grandparents bought for us (I loved to play math blaster and Spellicopter), or the feeling of accomplishment I had in solving student computer issues as an IT specialist on my undergraduate campus. I reveled in learning new things from my colleagues who were computer science majors, who taught me how to write my own simple programs. Pretty much all things aside from the calls to fix the printer jams which were a constant challenge.
As a beginning social studies teacher just out of college, I was able to get my position teaching in a rural school district because the job posting, I kid you not, was for 50% High School Social Studies Teacher, and 50% Computer Science/Desktop publishing teacher.
The principal, when I got the job, told me that I was the first woman who would be both a social studies teacher at the school, and the first woman to teach “computer science” at the school. I was 22 years old. He said that there weren’t many women who liked computer science. That statement stuck with me.
So when I became a principal and a superintendent, I always made sure there were opportunities to expand computer science in the true sense, to my students, but especially girls.
In the elementary school we used Girls Who Code and Code.org, and we used Roblox to hook kids into learning more about computers and coding. I was a member of the team that testified to the DPI Standards Committee in 2017 on Computer Science. I was in the workgroup with others who are probably in this room right now, developing the first Wisconsin standards for computer science. Those were the first standards developed in Wisconsin, in 2017.
Computer science, coding, app development, adaptive technology – it’s everywhere and it’s in everything we do now. And as Saghar Homayounpour, one of our 2024 Wisconsin Teachers of the Year said last year, “technology [intertwines] every aspect of our lives… we need to understand and adapt to the new ways this generation sees the world.”
In Code.org’s 2023 State of Computer Science Education report for Wisconsin, we see that 56% of our high schools offer a foundational computer science course (just shy of the national average). Yet still, only 21% of students who took foundational computer science were female.
As a state where 70% of our districts are considered rural, we know that 40% of our small school districts offer a foundational computer science course. These numbers have progressed, but definitely not enough.
Computer science education needs to be accessible for all students– whether they be in a rural, urban, or suburban setting. We need to continue to challenge the gender divide in CS class participation and into post-secondary educational attainment. And we must continue to push forward to address other kinds of inequity caused by funding bottlenecks at the state and local level.
Of course, we must also grow the number of educators who are confident and have the capacity to teach computer science. The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Wisconsin Dairyland chapter is focusing on building educator capacity through the CSTA, Matching Experienced and Novice Teachers for Ongoing Rigorous Support in Computer Science.
These are just a few of the ways that we have and will continue to prioritize and nurture computer science programs in Wisconsin schools.
Above all else, we strongly believe that creating an environment in Wisconsin schools which values computer science educators and enables them to work collaboratively to share their passion and ideas will yield a more robust, equitable, and exciting approach to teaching computer science that is truly inclusive of all of our students.