500 Million Dollars!

I watched Destin’s $500 Million Dollars video:

and had a few thoughts:

my highschool CS education

My highschool had computer teachers, but no computer science teachers. Luckily, we did have a teacher (Dick Van Kirk!) that was willing to sponsor an independent study of some computer science topics. I read the AP Computer Science A study guides and a bunch of the Java: How to Program (Deitel & Deitel) book and managed to get through the AP test with a top score. This enabled me to skip over the intro CSE142 at University of Washington.

This whole experience made the promise to increase highschool CS course availability for rural students really resonate with me – it’s very exciting to hear “rural schools” included in the earmarking callout.

substantial enough?

From the US Department of Education:

Across the United States there are 26,407 public secondary schools and 10,693 private secondary schools. ( Digest of Education Statistics, 2001, Table 89)

Let’s assume there’s no curriculum overhead or anything like that, and it all goes completely into the public school system. So, $500,000,000 / 26407 schools = $18,934.37/school.

According to the US News, the annual median salary for high school teachers was $57,200 in the US in 2015. So this represents approximately 1/3 of one headcount per public high school.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it seems likely to have some positive impact, so it seems like good news.

On the other, the amount (and especially the original $200M presidential mandate) seems unlikely to be substantial enough to accomplish the stated goal.