CS Ed within CTE Dashboards: Washington 2021

This blog post provides interactive dashboards to help understand computer science education within the context of CTE (Career and Technical Education) in Washington state. The source of this data is CTE enrollment data from the 2020-21 school year on the Washington OSPI data portal: Enrollment in CTE Courses by CIP Code.

In Washington state, the vast majority (98%) of high school computer science courses are taught as CTE (Career and Technical Education) courses. There’s a good reason for this. Students taking approved CTE courses provide schools with additional funding through the Carl D. Perkins Act.

Washington OSPI (Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction) organizes all CTE courses based on their CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) Code into seven Program Areas:

• Family and Consumer Sciences
• Skilled and Technical Sciences
• Business and Marketing Education
• Agricultural Education
• Health Sciences
• STEM
• All Program Areas

“All Program Areas” represents only “Career Choices” courses and is the smallest of all the program areas.

Computer Science is NOT a separate CTE program area despite its growing importance to the Washington economy and future jobs in Washington. “Computer Science” does not even appear on the OSPI webpage introducing the program areas. It is not part of the STEM program area as it is currently defined. Washington OSPI does have a dedicated Computer Science Program Supervisor, but the role is not mentioned at all within CTE.

This blog re-imagines what CTE in Washington state would look like if “Computer Science” were broken out into its own program area or at least given more visibility. My previous post on CS Education in Washington state utilized data from the 2020-21 K-12 Computer Science Education Data Summary Report. This report indicated that the following CIP Codes are used to determine computer science CTE courses:

The above CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) were re-mapped from their original program area to a fabricated “Computer Science” CTE program area. The results are in the Enrollments by Program Area dashboard below:

Only 5.1% of all CTE Enrollments are in Computer Science. If Computer Science were an actual CTE Program Area, it would rank just behind STEM at 5.9%. Most current Computer Science enrollments are counted in the CTE Business and Marketing program area except for Video Game Design which is part of Skilled and Technical Sciences.

Enrollments by CIP Code Dashboard

The Enrollments by CIP Code dashboard below shows again the relative size of each CTE Program Area and which CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) codes are used within each Program Area.

The dataset used for these dashboards provides data on the number of enrollments in each CIP code – information not available in the dataset used for my previous post on CS Ed in Washington. Through this dataset, we now know that “Computer Programming” (44% of CS enrollments) is the most popular CIP Code in the Computer Science program area followed by “Webpage/Digital/Multimedia and Information Design” (26% of CS enrollments). Only six of the 12 CIP codes mapped to “Computer Science” had over 100 enrollments state-wide and three have none at all.

Digging beyond these general CIP code classification enrollment numbers is problematic. While each CIP Code is mapped to one or more Washington state course codes, the actual course names and course contents used by school districts for a given course code may vary substantially.

The Enrollment by CIP Code dashboard above also provides some interesting – and surprising – insights into what courses are popular in Career and Technical Education.

Demographic by CTE Program Area Dashboard

The Demographic by CTE Program Area dashboard below shows how the demographics of students in the Computer Science program area compare to those in other program areas. The oft-mentioned issues with the lack of diversity in computer science courses show up here even relative to other program areas such as STEM and Health Sciences.

CTE Program Area by District Dashboard

The CTE Program Area by District Dashboard shows how different districts across the state have implemented CTE programs (including CS) relative to their student populations. School districts vary significantly in how they implement CTE. Many districts have combined percentages of over 100% indicative of students taking more than one CTE course in a given calendar year.

Comparison of Washington CS Education Datasets

The following table provides a breakdown of the differences between the Enrollment in CTE Courses by CIP Code in this post and the CS Education Report used in previous post. Because the Enrollment in CTE Courses provides data on both the 2019-20 and the 2020-21 school years only the data for 2020-21 is used in the table below:

While there are differences in the numbers in the two data sets, I feel that the numbers were close enough that both data sets reflected the same population. In particular, the CS Education report explicitly listed high schools and school districts that had no CS education enrollments. This helps account for some of the differences in numbers of districts and students. Data suppression rules may work differently depending on how the data is retrieved. The CS Education report also provides numbers on CS courses that do not have CIP codes to be included in the CTE report. Therefore, I used 26034 / 26663 = 98% as the percentage of CS enrollments that are CTE at the beginning of this blog post.

 

Source data and further information on how this dashboard was created can be found on Github