People keep asking me about how we’re doing with respect to gender balance and CS education at Stuy. Rather than writing the same email again and again, I figured I’d summarize things here. We’ve done rather well at Stuy. I might write more in depth at some point in the future but we don’t dumb anything down and we aren’t patronizing. I think much of the success can be attributed to:

The Problem: The buzz word is “accountability.” Why are teachers special? Why don’t they feel they need to be evaluated like other professionals? Why do they feel they need a “job for life?” Of course, the job for life line is nonsense – teachers have tenure, but that’s just due process - not a guarantee of a job. Friends in the private sector ask “if a teacher is doing a good job, why do they need tenure?

Today I had the privilege of attending my second live State of the City address. Mayor Bloomberg didn’t spend as much time on education as he did at last year’s address but he did take a moment to give a shout out to charter schools. It gets old hearing the same false story about how charters are better than public schools. At least we have people like Gary Rubinstein and Diane Ravitch trying to set the record straight.

So, it's Computer Science Education Week. Full of rah rah events and everyone's gung ho about teaching computer science. You all know that CS Ed is what I've dedicated most of my life to and maybe that's why I'm "not feeling it" in terms of CS Ed Week. Let me explain. Yesterday there was a Twitter Conversation led by a "national panel of thought leaders in the field." Click on the link.