Over the past few years, a number of states have acknowledged Computer Science as an academic area of study and have created pathways for certification. The actual requirements vary from state to state and indeed, even within a given state, there's a lot of variation. Here in New York, for instance there are some strong programs that will truly prepare a candidate to teach CS in K12 but too many others that are just "certificate mills" and the state doesn't seem to care.

I've been running Hunter's teacher certification program now for three years. We started with our Advanced Certificate which allows currently working teachers to earn an additional cert in CS and soon a few masters students joined the pipeline. In three years we've made great progress. Approximately 45 New York City teachers are either state certified to teach CS or are qualified to recieve the certification once they file with the state.

It's been a month since my last post. In fact it seems that most of the usual CS Ed bloggers are down in frequency this year. For me it's probably been Covid fatigue and the resulting funk but I'm going to see if I can force myself to write more frequently. So, the other day someone was asking about CS certification in NY state on Facebook. One comment caught my eye.

I'm super proud to say that New York City now has state certified Computer Science Teachers!!!!!! It's been a long road - really long if you consider I got started on my CS Ed journey decades ago and there's a long road ahead but we hit a major milestone. I started at Hunter a little over five years ago and creating teacher certification programs was one of the goals. Back then, the state had neither CS certification nor CS standards.

There were a few posts over on Facebook this weekend about teacher certification. It started with a question - should teacher certification be based on an exam like APCS-A with the teacher correctly answering 85% or greater. A lively discussion followed. There was agreement and disagreement with responses ranging from: good idea it's too hard it's not hard enough There was also a discussion of the importance of content knowledge vs knowing how to teach in general.

About a week ago New York State's new regulation creating a K12 CS teacher certification went live. Just the other day I was honored to be interviewed by Matt Flamm of Crain's New York in a follow up piece about it. Having K12 CS teacher certification is big and having quality programs that lead to certification is HUGE. In my view, it's a game changer. Let's Focus on high school, my wheelhouse.

Last April I woke up early and trekked up to Albany along with a few of my Hunter College colleagues to share our thoughts on K12 Computer Science teacher certification with the Board of Regents. We gave a presentation to the Regents Higher Education Committee and afterwards had a chance to talk with some of the Regents as well as other members of the New York State Department of Education.

You've probably seen an image like this: It's what you see when you try to access a secure web site but the web site itself certified itself as being secure. When people see this on a professional site it sets off all manner of red flags. We feel much more comfortable when go to a site and we don't see that error. When we see the secure green lock in the url bar indicating that this site is certified through an external trusted source.