America is failing its children by not teaching code in every high school

[Commentary] Information technology was one of the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields with the most job postings in the US in 2013, and job postings requiring coding skills stayed open the longer than most. There’d be more people to fill these jobs if there were more computer science graduates, and there’d be more graduates if more people could start the subject in high school. And yet it’s difficult to find a high-quality computer science class in American high schools, let alone a programming class.

There are many reasons why American schools are poor at teaching coding -- so many that the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) published a 75-page report enumerating them. The biggest is that the public school system is decentralized. Most public schools follow national teaching guidelines -- the Common Core -- and complete standardized tests based on those, but US states and local bodies make classroom-level decisions. Creating a future army of coders is not the sole purpose of the classes. These kids are going to be surrounded by computers -- in their pockets, in their offices, in their homes -- for the rest of their lives. The younger they learn how computers think, how to coax the machine into producing what they want -- the earlier they learn that they have the power to do that -- the better.