This opens a new front in Silicon Valley’s push for a much bigger tech emphasis in California’s public schools. The Golden State is one of the 25 states that don’t require passing a computer science class to get a high school degree, resisting a national trend.

Sunday’s San Jose Mercury-News has details:

It’s the backbone of Silicon Valley’s world-changing tech industry, but — like journalism and geography — computer science is considered just another high school elective by the University of California.

 

Now, a powerful coalition of technology leaders, state politicians and high school teachers has taken aim at the university’s influential set of high school courses required for admission, pressuring UC to count computer science as advanced math, alongside calculus and statistics.

 

They say elevating computer science would encourage more California high schools to offer it — and more students to sign up … .

 

“My kids learn how the Internet works from the ground up; they learn how to program. It’s mathematical thinking,” said Karen Hardy, a computer science teacher at Wilcox High in Santa Clara.

 

Like many others, Hardy believes UC’s stance is holding back California schools. “I feel like we’re in the Dark Ages,” she said.

Gender, racial disparities cited in who takes classes

The Los Angeles Times’ coverage of Newsom’s letter emphasized …

… concern about the gender and racial gap of those taking courses and pursuing computer science as a profession.

 

According to data cited in the letter, fewer than 9,000 California high school students took the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam in 2015. Of those students, only about 2,300 were girls, less than 1,000 were Latinos and about 150 were black.

 

According to state data, meanwhile, salaries for computing jobs are high — averaging an annual $105,622 — but the number of graduates in the field are not expected to meet workforce demands.

But it’s not just schools in poor communities or rural areas that aren’t providing access to computer science. According to Re/Code, fewer than 5 percent of high school students in San Francisco took computer science in the 2014-15 school year, with a lack of classes seen as why.

Here’s a partial list of the executives who co-signed the letter with Newsom: Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman, Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!.

Other signatories included California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, superintendent-president of Long Beach City College, and Republican Assembly Leader Kristin Olsen.

Newsom is a member of the UC Board of Regents as part of his duties as lieutenant governor.

But there are a few problems with this narrative in the Golden State. For starters, the high cost of housing is at least as responsible as stagnant wages for California having the nation’s highest poverty rate. The federal minimum wage could double from the present $7.25, and poverty would still be sky-high here so long as mediocre one-bedroom apartments rent for $1,200 a month or more in urban areas.

What would bring down the cost of housing? Adding more housing stock by limiting regulations blocking new construction and incentivizing developers to build mixes of middle-income and lower-income housing.

Will CA Dems ever do that? Of course not. Growth is evil, yunno. Even if opposing it hurts poor people. Gaia must be honored.

The best way to create middle-class jobs

But where the Democrats’ posturing on income inequality is most unhelpful is with public education. If we wanted to create middle-class opportunities galore for kids in poor communities, we would mandate that they take computer science in high school. I wrote about this angle in March:

Even if minimum-wage hikes don’t kill jobs, the idea that this policy is a promising solution to income inequality makes little sense. In the big picture, what we need are many more people with in-demand job skills that lead to middle-income careers. And what we badly need from our elected leaders is an acknowledgment that California’s approach isn’t working in creating these job skills.

Income inequality isn’t just growing in the U.S. It’s growing in all advanced nations as technological advances wipe out middle-class jobs by the millions. It’s growing everywhere as the job marketplace increasingly values — and strongly rewards — a narrower range of skills than it did previously.

The best way to minimize the disruption this inexorable change creates is by maximizing the number of people with job skills not diminished by “creative destruction.” For starters, we need a focus on computer science and technological expertise in middle school and high school — not curriculums based on the educational values of the 1950s. We also need to make it much easier for displaced workers of any age to go back to the classroom to get practical job training.

Pursuing this ambitious agenda would be far more daunting than raising the minimum wage. But it has promise to significantly reduce income inequality — not nibble at the margins.

Will Biden make this point? Or just posture with Occupy-style rhetoric about the 1 percent?

You know the answer. President Obama may have a good record of calling for incompetent teachers to get the boot, but he has had little to say about the urgent need to revamp high-school graduation requirements for the 21st century.

Why? It’s tough not to think that it’s because it would cost 10 percent or more of high-school teachers their jobs. Never forget that the main opposition in New York state in the late 1990s to ending or scaling back failed bilingual education policies came from teacher union leaders who were upset it would mean pink slips for many “Spanish immersion” teachers.

Get ready for traffic hell, Los Angeles

Meanwhile, Angelenos once again will face a traffic nightmare today because of Biden’s visit and the Obama administration’s latest Socal money-grubbing. Joe Mathews had an enjoyably tart take on this last week:

Bad news: President Obama is coming to California again.

Mr. President, I realize such a statement may seem jarring. After all, our state voted for you twice. When you were first running for president, Maria Shriver said, “If Barack Obama were a state, he’d be California.” But these days, I bet I could rally a majority of Californians behind a proposition asking that you never visit again. And I wouldn’t even have to talk about your record-low job approval ratings among Californians.

No, our fundamental problem with you is more personal than political. You, sir, have developed a reputation as a very poor houseguest.

You often show up with little warning about your itinerary or schedule. (Your excuse? That the Secret Service can’t disclose your movements for security reasons.) Your massive security cordon routinely causes hours-long traffic jams in a state that already has too many of them. I was once two hours late picking up a child from day care because you just had to stop for takeout in Los Angeles during the evening rush hour.

Mathews makes this case that this might be more palatable if the president actually seemed familiar with and eager to address California issues. But Obama doesn’t and isn’t.

Your trips here have come to feel like those political fundraising emails that keep arriving this time of year. You’re spamming us, Mr. President. If you can’t do better by California on these trips, then maybe you should stop visiting.

This isn’t the first time Joe Mathews has griped about such inconveniences. Here he also takes a shot at George Clooney. Now he’s really getting too big for his britches.

I wrote about this angle in the U-T San Diego today:

“University of California-Irvine economist David Neumark’s review of 100-plus major academic studies — which did not include studies from ideologically aligned think tanks — concluded that 85 percent of the analyses “find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers.” Automation is likely to worsen this effect; Google “Europe” and “Corner Café” and you’ll see a Starbucks initiative that inevitably will be copied and yield mass displacement of U.S. fast-food workers.

“But even if minimum-wage hikes don’t kill jobs, the idea that this policy is a promising solution to income inequality makes little sense. In the big picture, what we need are many more people with in-demand job skills that lead to middle-income careers. And what we badly need from our elected leaders is an acknowledgment that California’s approach isn’t working in creating these job skills.

“Income inequality isn’t just growing in the U.S. It’s growing in all advanced nations as technological advances wipe out middle-class jobs by the millions. It’s growing everywhere as the job marketplace increasingly values — and strongly rewards — a narrower range of skills than it did previously.

“The best way to minimize the disruption this inexorable change creates is by maximizing the number of people with job skills not diminished by ‘creative destruction.’ For starters, we need a focus on computer science and technological expertise in middle school and high school — not curriculums based on the educational values of the 1950s. We also need to make it much easier for displaced workers of any age to go back to the classroom to get practical job training.

“Pursuing this ambitious agenda would be far more daunting than raising the minimum wage. But it has promise to significantly reduce income inequality — not nibble at the margins.”

Does left want to create middle-class jobs? Or play populist games?

As the success of the “war on women” rhetoric in getting young women to the polls in 2012 suggests, both parties are likely to be in permanent 24-7-365 campaign mode on a national level from here on out. That doesn’t bode well for substantive debate.

But at some point, it seems likely that the middle class — especially those with laid-off family memories or nervousness about their own prospects — will begin to tire of the Occupy rhetoric and the class-war cliches — the very efforts that laid the groundwork for the current relentless focus by Dems on the minimum wage. I wrote about the diminishing long-term returns of populist rhetoric in January:

“We could have marginal income tax rates of 90 percent, and it wouldn’t change the fact that for 40 years we have been moving inexorably toward an economy in which elite skill sets are highly rewarded while improving technology and automation steadily thin out jobs in which those with average job skills used to be able to make middle-class wages. Instead of the 1 percent vs. 99 percent divide, this is the divide that matters most. New York Times economics columnist Tyler Cowen pegs this gap as the 15 percent of working adults with elite job skills vs. the 85 percent without. …

“Thinking in fresh new ways about how we can become the society we need to become is not as tidy or viscerally satisfying as simply blaming the 1 percent. But it has far greater promise of actually yielding a more broadly prosperous society.”

In California, alas, thinking in fresh new ways is verboten in the state Capitol. Majority lawmakers are vastly more likely to use their clout to protect unions and public employees, to give trial lawyers new ways to squeeze money out of the legal system, and to pay tribute to the green religion then to actually take steps to create middle-class jobs.

Will most Californians notice this? Maybe not. I increasingly buy the theory that values drive voting more than pocketbook issues, a big change from a generation ago. And so in California, as long as non-white voters believe right-wingers are uncomfortable with them, right-wingers are doomed in statewide elections. As long as independent, secular Californians believe right-wingers are judgmental social conservatives, they’re doomed in statewide elections.

But if California libertarians and fiscal conservatives ever managed to advance a candidate who kept the focus on jobs and the economy and avoided the right’s baggage, it wouldn’t take a miracle for a GOPer to get elected to statewide office — just a 5-to-1, UCLA-in-this-year’s-March-Madness kind of long shot.

By Chris Reed

The reports earlier this month that the state will no longer require eighth-graders to take Algebra 1 and allow them instead to take a somewhat less rigorous course covering algebra touched off a minor flap between those who saw this as dumbing-down standards and those who noted that the less rigorous course was better preparation for new state standardized tests.

But what’s needed is a far broader debate on the wisdom of having high-school graduation requirements that largely reflect the thinking of the mid-20th century.

This is the official California Department of Education list of the 13 year-long courses that students must complete to graduate:

* Three courses in English;

          * Two courses in mathematics, including one year of Algebra I (EC Section 51224.5);

* Two courses in science, including biological and physical sciences;

* Three courses in social studies, including United States history and geography; world history, culture, and geography; a one-semester course in American government and civics, and a one-semester course in economics;

* One course in visual or performing arts, foreign language, or commencing with the 2012-13 school year, career technical education. For the purpose of satisfying the minimum course requirement, a course in American Sign Language shall be deemed a course in foreign language;

* Two courses in physical education, unless the pupil has been exempted pursuant to the provisions of EC Section 51241

Suppose this year we saw a California commission start from scratch in assembling a list of mandatory courses for high school graduation. It would have faced near-universal incredulity from any bright person of any age and everyone under 30 if the list didn’t include a year of computer science.

‘Veneration’ for past or devotion to teacher status quo?

Computers are so central to work, society, our personal lives and more that it is hard to fathom that computer science isn’t a mandatory emphasis of K-12 public education. In an April 2011 joint interview with retiring San Diego State University President Stephen Weber, I asked him about the insanity of not requiring computer science and whether he shared my view that graduation standards were badly outdated.

“Absolutely. One of the frustrations of my life is that it’s so hard to move embedded systems. I can’t imagine anybody if you sat down with a blank piece of paper that would invent the high school curriculum that we have now,” said Weber, who won high marks for turning SDSU into the star of the CSU system and a place with a stronger freshman class than several UC campuses.

Weber credited the inertia to what he called the “strange human veneration for what was done in the past.” Yet there is another reason why California high school graduation rules reflect the values of the Golden State of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years: Changing graduation requirements threatens to put not just a few thousand but tens of thousands of teachers out on the streets.

This is not far-fetched. This is how teachers unions think. Even after the evidence grew overwhelming that bilingual education was a failure that handicapped many students, teachers unions in the Northeast fought bitterly for the retention of the programs. What was best for students wasn’t their priority.

If California high school students were required to take one yearlong computer science program to graduate, that’s a lot of displaced teachers. If state high schoolers were required to take two — which is the strong recommendation of highly successful Del Mar high-tech entrepreneur and school activist Michael Robertson — the displacement would be immense.

But whether the mandate is for one year or two years of computer science, it would be good for kids, good for California, good for America. Everybody seems to agree about the need to promote STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — education. Yet few seem to connect this desire for a highly capable STEM workforce with the option of using high-school graduation mandates to promote such a workforce.

When I interviewed Weber in 2011, I asked the San Diego State president about the game-changing “A Nation at Risk” report issued by a federal commission in 1983 that kicked off the education reform movement with this instantly famous description of the U.S. school system: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Weber said he was deeply frustrated that resulting reforms failed to live up to the vision outlined in the report.

‘Nation at Risk’ report touted computer science requirement — in 1983

And what did “A Nation at Risk” grasp was critical in 1983 that still eludes California educators and leaders 30 years later? The importance of computer science and a technologically literate workforce.

The report called for a half-year of computer science to be a high school graduation requirement. The 1983 status quo of limited emphasis on science, technology and math was unacceptable, the authors warned:

“These deficiencies come at a time when the demand for highly skilled workers in new fields is accelerating. … Computers and computer-controlled equipment are penetrating every aspect of our lives . … Technology is radiaclly transforming a host of … occupations. They include health care, medical science, energy production, food processing, construction, and the building, repair and maintenance of sophisticated scientific, educational, military, and industrial equipment.”

If all this was obvious in 1983, it is 1 million times more obvious in 2013. And yet instead of making computer science a high school graduation requirement, here’s what the state that gave the world Silicon Valley, the iPhone and so much more frets about: what sort of algebra class to make students take.

In so doing, California joins Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia on the list of the 41 states that do not allow computer science to count toward completing high school math or science graduation requirements. Supply your own punch line — at least if you’re not too depressed about the latest confirmation of the horrible stewardship of our leaders.