Yesterday I shared my thoughts on Bill de Blasio's plans to "fix" the selection criteria for New York City's specialized high schools. If you haven't read the post, you can find it here. I was going to get back to CS and CS Ed related blogging today but there's more to the story. In spite of what BdB stated, it's not enough for him to switch to another measure - the middle school state exam along with some modifiers.

Yesterday, Bill de Blasio, the current Mayor of New York City outlined how he would "fix" our specialized schools. The schools he was referring to were the "big three" of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech and then five additional schools - The High School for Math Science and Engineering at CCNY, The High School for American Studies at Lehman, Brooklyn Latin, The Queens Arts and Science High School at York College, and Staten Island Tech.

I tweeted this the other day: Why don't so many teachers and professors understand that the test or assignment you can do in 15 minutes will take your beginning students at least an hour and probably a lot more to complete. — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) April 18, 2018 What led to the tweet was a discussion I was having with some students about not having enough time on tests which led to a discussion of having to drop everything to spend every waking hour on a project.

Alfred Thompson wrote about CS education tools earlier today. I've also been meaning to write on the topic but from a different point of view. I do my best to keep up with the latest and greatest in the CS world both on the academic side as well as the professional one. That's not really possible, but I do my best. When I have a small project to work on I'll some times use it as an excuse to play with some recent technology.

I've been meaning to write about ethics in CS education for a while. Probably since I saw this article in the NY Times but got sidetracked. I was reminded when I saw this tweet by Hadi the other day: This message is bigger than Facebook. Computer science faces an ethics crisis. That’s why @codeorg covers ethics and digital citizenship in our computer science courses. (And we’re thankful that most of the largest tech companies support us) https://t.

The ACM recently announced this year's winners of the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. Over on his blog, Alfred Thompson noted that the winners were either from independent or magnet public schools. Alfred also noted that most of the winners of prestigious science competitions like the Regeneron Science Talent Search (nee Intel, nee Westinghouse) were from public magnet schools. In his post, Alfred ruminates on this and wonders "how to we add the flexibility and support to more students at more schools?

Next up from SIGCSE 2018 is John MacCormick's session on Strategies for Baing the CS Theory Course on Non-decision Problems MacCormicks's stance is that CS theory is tough the first time around and using non-decision problems is a viable approach to make theory more accessible to beginners. As MacCormick said in his paper: … a decision problem may ask the yes/no question, "Does this graph have a Hamilton cycle?" The corresponding non-decision problem is, "Please give me a Hamilton cycle of this graph if it has one.

After reading a couple of comments on my last post where I talked a bit about practitioners vs researchers I thought I'd expand and expound a bit. While there are education researchers that I very much respect, overall, I'm skeptical of education research. Note that I'm not talking specifically about CS Ed research but rather education research in general. Let's go back to the beginning. I entered teaching from industry.

In the New York City department of education a recurring hot topic is the Absent Teacher Reserve or ATR pool. A teacher or administrator in the ATR pool is a licensed, most likely tenured teacher not assigned permanently to a school. Each year these educators get shuttled from school to school and denied a chance to actually settle in a position. The ATR pool was created under the Bloomberg administration.

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.