LOS ANGELES (AP) — Even in a nation in which most every school has Internet access and computer use often starts by nursery school, teachers of technology see a warning message flashing.
For students in elementary and secondary schools, states have few developed standards or required courses in computer science — a field that goes beyond basic literacy to encompass hardware and software design, real-world applications and computers’ effect on society.
Such lean course work means that many students don’t have the chance to study the science of computers until college, where a declining number are majoring in the subject. Somehow, teachers say, states must embrace the idea of training sophisticated computer users at a younger age.
The sell isn’t easy. Computer science, like other subjects, is fighting for time on student schedules and a place on the political agenda, where reading and math dominate.
“Students don’t have to take our classes, it’s only an option,” said Jim Lindberg, who teaches computer software applications to high school students in Tacoma, Wash. “Some kids, for whatever reason, are missing the opportunity to at least take a bite out of the class, to see what it’s all about … They would use the skills they learn for the rest of their lives.”
Technology teachers spoke to the Associated Press during a group interview at the annual meeting of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, on Sunday.
Mike Brown, an instructional supervisor for Robertson County Schools in Springfield, Tenn., said more high school students should be learning programming, Web site management or graphics. Instead, they take basic keyboarding and graduate without much computer savvy, he said.
Computer science teachers say they are facing a perception that careers in the field are more difficult to come by since the dot-com collapse a few years ago. Federal job forecasts contradict that notion, and careers from criminology to biology often demand advanced computer training.
In the United States, the number of bachelor’s degrees in computer and information sciences soared 91 percent from 1997 to 2002, during the tech boom. Recently, however, the popularity of computer science as a major for incoming freshmen has plummeted, falling more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2004, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at University of California at Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, technology executives have told Congress that they increasingly are relying on employees from overseas and clamoring for more U.S. graduates with stronger science skills.
Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, said the nation needs students who are prepared to develop software, design hardware, program languages and manage databases.
“We need to get [students] to the level of creating original works with their skills,” she said. “We want to see a generation of tool builders, not just tool users, because tool builders have the economic power in the world.”
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