Their Fight is Our Fight: Why Computing Education Advocates Must Be in Solidarity with Public Schools

Abstract

Those working towards equitable K12 computing education in the United States have always had their work cut out for them: understanding how best to teach, developing robust curricula, designing novel tools, building teacher capacity, and supporting systemic change in schools to bring equitable computing education to young people. Collectively, these areas represent an ambitious and complex set of problems to solve. But current changes to the educational landscape in the United States—where teaching basic ideas about how to critically engage with the world has become deeply politicized, and where forces working towards privatization of education are on the rise—require us to broaden the scope of our work. Our efforts must shift to not just include the aforementioned problems but also include ones that are more explicitly political: engaging in solidarity with the larger project of public education, and supporting teachers to have the freedom to teach what students will need to contribute to our society.