Amazon Calls For Funding K-12 CS, Eyes $250M Seed Money From Congress

theodp writes: The U.S. isn't producing nearly enough students trained in computer science to meet the future demands of the American workforce," lamented Amazon in a Friday press release, adding that it is "urging Congress and legislatures across the U.S. to support -- and fund -- computer science education in public schools." Well, the 'urging' seems to be working. On Friday, Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) reintroduced the Computer Science for All Act (Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all lobbied for the bill's predecessor, the CS for All Act of 2019), which provides $250 million in new grants to support a diverse 'tech pipeline' in pre-K through grade 12 education.

Amazon and Amazon-funded nonprofit Code.org were cited as the bill's 'supporting organizations' and quoted in Lee's accompanying press release for the legislation, which aims to improve equity in CS education. "We look forward to working with Representative Lee and the bill's cosponsors to meet these objectives," said Brian Huseman, VP of Public Policy for Amazon, which in 2017 curiously broke from other tech giants and stopped releasing the gender and racial data on its workforce it's required to report to the federal government. "Right now, there are over 400,000 open computing jobs in the United States," added Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. "Frustratingly, only 47% of our public high schools teach computer science.

Increasing your own profift is NOT real charity

[shanen]

What a feeble FP.

Initial hypothesis is that if Amazon is doing it, then it must be bad. Yeah, Amazon isn't the only evil corporate cancer out there, but it's the "best" (= "worst") combination of being evil and damaging. (The interesting fourth box of the 2D ontology is "the road to hell via good intentions", but I have yet to detect a good intention at Amazon.)

So it is trivially obvious to the most casual observer that this is an especially self-serving and fake charity. The actual and obvious objective is

Re:

[shanen]

Disguised charity. Ditto CSR, etc. Maybe you prefer the "creative accounting" label?

Cheaper that way

[halltk1983]

They want it to be taught in K-12, so they can devalue it and pay people that do it professionally less.

Re:

[chispito]

They want it to be taught in K-12, so they can devalue it and pay people that do it professionally less.

What is the alternative?

Re:

[halltk1983]

Teach kids the actual basics like algorithms and variable structure. How it compares to math, and how it differs. Make it available, not forced, changing high school to be more vocational. Cover the cost of advanced education at state schools, so that those with an interest are able to follow it regardless of income. Schools these days are already overfull with things that could be better explored with focus.

Re:

[srichard25]

Pay developers the same as management and sales?

Let That Cunt Bezos Pay for It

[theshowmecanuck]

250M wouldn't even be noticed from his bank balance. He can use a bunch of that extra money he made outsourcing and sweatshopping.

Re:

[Type44Q]

Let That Cunt Bezos Pay for It

It won't do him any good; you coders know that while there a million ways to skin a cat, doing it right is as much an art as a science, and if there's no passion, there'll be no good code.

Re:

[Krishnoid]

Well, he'd notice it. It's not cheap like a house in Los Angeles or a fleet of Tesla SUVs [youtu.be].

Re:

[fustakrakich]

Bezos (and Musk) is the richest beggar on the planet. [theintercept.com]. Congress has no problem giving them billions

Re:

[rickb928]

Precisely. Begging for crumbs implies something else at work. Maybe time to push our government around bit more?

Oh, wait. He doesn't need to 'push our government around'. They are aligned already.

My interpretation of this...

[Pollux]

Bezos saw a need for more programmers. He looked at his drawing board and saw two options:

Option A) Pay them more, incentivizing more people to study CS; or
Option B) Have taxpayers pay for schools to teach more CS, increasing the supply of CS graduates, decreasing their demand and salaries.

And since Bezos already does everything within his power to not pay taxes, Option B was a win-win!

Re:

[shanen]

Yes, but AWS. Am I the only person around here who sees the obvious link to PROFIT?

(No, I see that ErichTheRed has also mentioned AWS.)

Boycott SEXIST code.org

[greytree]

code.org think the solution to the problem of "not enough students trained in computer science to meet the future demands of the American workforce," is to FINE teachers for letting boys into their CS classes.

Boycott code.org

https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]

And yet

[stabiesoft]

Local governments fall all over each other to give amazon and other large businesses that are crying for these better educated citizens the tax breaks that pay for this type of education. K-12 is funded by local property taxes in most places. In TX even community colleges are funded by property taxes. And what do these large companies get to build some new facility? Oh, property tax breaks. Reapin what you sowed Jeffy.

Wage suppression, workforce insurance or both?

[ErichTheRed]

One of the problems with "coding" and the other jobs these classes target is that you can only teach so much. Either you have a logical mind capable of a million levels of abstract thought, or you don't. I'm in IT and we have a similar problem with people with no troubleshooting skills trying to get and hold onto jobs. Either development is going to have to get simpler than it already is, or people will need to really ramp up their overall ability levels.

I imagine the simplification side of this equation is going to be in the form of (surprise) AWS proprietary, AWS-only, super-easy SDK provided, It Just Works!-level PaaS services. Getting people used to using only these services by not teaching fundamentals would be a really good way to ensure future business. I work in a development shop on the IT aide of the house and everything is "serverless" now...when coding becomes Legos even more than it is now, then anyone can code. We're seeing this in IT too -- on the Microsoft side of the house, Microsoft has discontinued all fundamentals training like the MCSA/MCSE track in favor of how-to-drive-Azure services.

The reasons for all this aren't altruistic in the least. FAANGs and Microsoft hate having to pay Seattle and San Francisco inflated salaries for developers, and they know they can only push offshoring so far - both due to public opinion and the same law of non-infinite talent. Why pay $300K for a Google SRE when you can force it down to a $50K job by flooding the market with good-enough people?

Critical thinking

[fermion]

There are few jobs for kids who cannot think. Even if the kids are not directly programming computers, code.ord can teach them thinking, process, and self motivation. We need to move away from rote facts and testing. It is a waste of money

Re:

[ChrisMaple]

Without tests, there is no knowing that the material has been learned.

It does not matter

[zkiwi34]

Until the university system insists on rigorous CS education that they will actually recognize as required prior learning in CS. As they do for ALL other programs of study. But they will not.

$250M for 56M K-12 Students, $500M for 1 Yacht

[theodp]

Bezos Commissions a $500 Million Mega Yacht That Comes With Its Own Support Yacht [entrepreneur.com]

Now I understand why California

[oldgraybeard]

is trying to ditch advance mathematics in High school. They need the time to teach K-6 Computer Science catch Up classes.

Woo! $250M!

[Chas]

Looks good until you do the actual math.

131K K-12 schools in the US.
$2000 per school (rounding up for simplicity's sake).

56M K-12 students in the US.
$4.50 per student.

"Frustratingly, only 47% of our public...

[RitchCraft]

...high schools teach computer science." There's a simple reason for that. The pay to teach CS in a high school setting stinks. The cost of getting a CS degree, on top of the re-certifying every few years, makes it impossible to get people in CS to teach. I know ... I was a high school CS teacher for 18 years. I loved teaching but the onslaught of poorly implemented state testing, mis-managed teacher evaluations trying to place all blame on teachers for poor school scores, and coupled with less that 3% pay raises each year drove me away.

Re:

[ChrisMaple]

Teaching computer science to most high school students is a fool's errand.

Teach logic, rudimentary coding, spreadsheets, simple shell scripts. There are many computer basics that can be taught that will provide results that are practical and/or showy. Teaching computer science - a dozen different sorting algorithms, how to write a compiler - is inappropriate before college.

Re:

[RitchCraft]

I agree with you. For the first 10 years my class was geared toward "discovery" of computer science topics. On average 80% of my students were curious about Information Technology and wanted to see if that was something they wanted to pursue as a career. The other 20% knew they wanted to get into IT as a career and already possessed some skills upon entry into the class. Then state mandatory testing hit. All of the sudden I was mandated to get 100% of my students either A+ or CCNA certified. Of course only