Stuck in the Shallow End: Race, Education and Computing

  • Jane Margolis | Senior Researcher, the Institute of Democracy, Education and Access, UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low. Relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities and preparation needed for them to choose computer science as a field of study and profession. Let us look at the daily experiences of students in three Los Angeles public high schools: an overcrowded urban high school, a math and science magnet school and a well funded school in an affluent neighborhood. We will find a kind of “virtual segregation” that maintains inequality by:

  • Providing a lack of qualified teachers
  • Isolating the teachers that do exist
  • The narrowing of the curriculum toward test taking prep
  • Misguided technology politics that don’t distinguish access to computers and access to computational thinking.

We will also see how students and teachers, given the necessary tools: can change the system.

Speaker Details

Jane Margolis received her MA in Psychology from Harvard in 1985 and her Ph.D in Education from Harvard, 1990, and has written widely about the gender and race gap in computer science. Margolis is the author of many journal articles and books including Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing.

Watch Next