All students are created equal, but all high schools aren’t.
The 2021 State of Computer Science Education report utilizes the percentage of high schools with a foundational computer science course as the key indicator to measure a state’s progress in computer science education. This percentage is 51.7% nationwide. But this is an imperfect measure for several reasons. To start, schools that provide a CS course are 3.3 times larger than those that don’t.
A better indicator would be the percentage of students enrolled in a foundational computer science course (StFCS). The Executive Summary of the 2021 State of Computer Science Education Report provides the following factoid:
Across 37 states, only 4.7% of high school students are enrolled in foundational computer science.
Several state reports include data on StFCS. An appendix also provides all the information collected on this metric
Despite its advantages as an indicator, StFCS is a relative footnote to the percentage of high schools offering computer science in the report. I believe there are three reasons for this treasure chest treatment:
- 2021 was the first year this data was collected. Footnotes to the data abound.
- Only 37 states (including DC) provided this data. CA was one of the notable states that did not.
- A normative value is much harder to define. While we can advocate for 100% of high schools to offer computer science with a straight face, advocating for 100% of all high school students to take computer science every year is a stretch for most of us.
Because this is an obscure blog post rather than a well-publicized, major nationwide report with beautiful infographics, I have more freedom to open the “treasure chest” that is StFCS for the valuable insights it provides despite current limitations. My previous posts on women students, Black students, and Hispanic-Latinx students demonstrated how using StFCS as the “Participation” layer in the CAPE framework helps expose where the bottlenecks occur in the CS pathways for these three groups. In this post, I will look at how StFCS as a standalone statistic can reveal valuable insights into the state of HS CS education in the US.
As mentioned above, the percentage of high school students enrolled in foundational computer science (StFCS) is 4.7% nationwide. The following histogram shows how individual states perform in StFCS and top performers:
Also of interest is the FCS Uptake Ratio which indicates what percentage of students in an HS with CS enroll in CS:
Students enrolled in foundational computer science /
Students in a high school that offers foundational computer science
The FCS Uptake Ratio is 5.9% nationally. It is also an indicator of how efficiently teachers are deployed in schools to teach CS. The following histogram shows how individual states perform in FCS Uptake Ratio and top performers:
First, South Carolina, Maryland, and Utah are doing exemplary work enrolling high school students in computer science courses. Their stats have been so outstanding that I’ve even considered that they have been calculating this new statistic differently from other states. I sincerely hope to document the steps that these states have taken to be so successful in this critical metric in a future blog post.
The above charts also help us determine goals for the percentage of students in foundational computer science (StFCS) and the FCS Uptake Ratio. As a thought experiment, imagine if all high school students had to take a semester of computer science in the ninth grade. If so, then a realistic goal for StFCS would be 12.5% – Maryland’s actual value for 2021. Likewise, the target for the FCS Uptake Ratio for both a state and an individual school level should also be 12.5%. And if we wanted all students to take at least a year of computer science in high school, then South Carolina’s actual value of 21.0% seems a realistic goal for both StFCS and the FCS Uptake Ratio.
Finally, multiplying the average size of a high school with FCS (938) by the FCS Uptake Ratio (5.9%) results that the average school with computer science has about 62 students (2 – 3 sections) taking computer science at any one time. This implies very few full-time computer science teachers – as I was – and the desperate need to train teachers of other subjects to be able to teach computer science.
*********
Two notes regarding the data used in this post:
- While writing this post, I noticed that my calculations did not include Montana, although it did provide partial FCS student data for the 2021 report. However, because of Montana’s sparse population and how close its data was to national averages, it did not have a material effect on the results in this post.
- One topic of discussion I did not include in this post was why I believe that the national averages cited in this article regarding StFCS are very close to the actual national averages, despite including data from only 37 states. If you would like more information on this topic, please comment on this post and ask for such.
Please visit the CSEd Analytics page for the underlying data and reports behind this blog post for more nuanced information. The attached reports will also show how your state compares to others in critical CSEd metrics. The next post in the #CSEdAnlytics series will dive into the percentage of high students taking an AP CS Exam and related metrics from the 2021 State of Computer Science Education report.