This article made its rounds this past week.

It cites a couple of papers claiming that CS teachers are delivering better instruction and might be better qualified than teachers in other subject areas. This is in spite of the fact that CS teachers generally have a generally weak background in CS as well as in CS related pedagogy compared to teachers of other more well established subjects.

The papers forming the basis for the article were written by Paul Bruno a professor of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership

From the article, a key measure in determining the results in the papers related to the number of students taking AP exams. Those results indicated that "When computer science instructors had an additional year of experience teaching that subject, their students were more likely to take the advanced placement exam, and they also scored slightly higher."

After making that statement, the article quotes from Bruno:

“Even when veteran teachers lack formal experience with or specialized training in computer science, they may have other attributes that make them effective instructors,” Bruno said. “Staffing these courses with veteran teachers may be a reasonable way for schools to expand their computer science curricula, when recruiting faculty who have specialized training in this subject is challenging.”

Unfortunately, I don't have access to Bruno's papers but I find this last quote troublesome and take issue with the article. I do want to emphasize however that I'm just talking about the article on the papers, I can't comment on what the papers actually did or didn't say.

The thing is comparing high school CS, and in particular AP scores is an apples and oranges comparison. You just can't meaningfully do it.

Are we talking about APCS Principles or APCS-A? APCS-A is a college level course. APCS-P is a high school course that can be handled by a typical 10th grader.

I doubt a teacher without a decent CS background is doing a great job in APCS-A but regardless, I know students who've passed the APCS-A exam by using canned curricula - something that, to my knowledge isn't done in other subjects like Calculus, AP-Bio or APUSH.

If APCS-P is the class in question, then it's really apples and oranges. AP-Bio - college level - you take it after Bio and Chemistry. AP-Calculus - college level - you take it after you've taken all the other high school math classes.

APCS-P - no prerequisites and as I mentioned in my last post, Over my 8 years at Hunter College, I've seen far too many students who've gotten a 5 in APCS-P who really didn't learn anything (however, all these students were very bright and hard working and generally did very well in my CS0 class and then beyond).

I'm pretty sure you can't get a 3, let alone a 5 in AP Calculus without actually knowing any Calculus.

So how can you compare? A teacher can't do well teaching Calculus unless they know Calculus but APCS-P is set up so that a student can indeed get a passing exam grade without really learning anything.

I'm sure that last sentence will ruffle some feathers but that's what I've seen looking over 6 cohorts of around 25 students each year. I'll go further and say that while i didn't track the numbers, there were numerous applicants to my program with passing APCS-AP scores who struggled with classes like Geometry.

You can't compare an APCS-P score with any other AP score.

APCS-P is also promoted as an AP you can take without any prerequisites and there's been a HUGE CS push over the last decade. Compare that to AP-Bio where only students interested in pursuing Bio typically take the class. AP Calculus is more regularly taken but it's seen as "the next" math class so it's also different - can't take that until you finish all the other math classes.

I'd love to see Bruno's actual work - he may very well account for all of these things but K12 computer science is already plagued with too much "you don't need to know CS to teach CS" so while withholding judgment on the source material I'm giving the article two thumbs down.

2024 Calc - over 550,000 APush 250000 AP Euro 83000 Bio 260,000 APCSA 98,136

APCSP 175,261