Stuck in the Shallow End – Education, Race and Computing - Hardcover

Margolis, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262135043 ISBN 13: 9780262135047

Publisher: MIT Press, 2008

Synopsis

The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low, according to recent surveys. And 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. In "Stuck in the Shallow End", Jane Margolis looks at the daily experiences of students and teachers 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. She finds an insidious "virtual segregation" that maintains inequality.Two of the three schools studied offer only low-level, how-to (keyboarding, cutting and pasting) introductory computing classes. The third and wealthiest school offers advanced courses, but very few students of color enroll in them. The race gap in computer science, Margolis finds, is one example of the way students of color are denied a wide range of occupational and educational futures. Margolis traces the interplay of school structures (such factors as course offerings and student-to-counselor ratios) and belief systems - including teachers' assumptions about their students and students' assumptions about themselves. "Stuck in the Shallow End" is a story of how inequality is reproduced in America - and how students and teachers, given the necessary tools, can change the system.

About this title

Review:

""Stuck in the Shallow End" is an insightful, nuanced view into a complex set of problems. In the end, this book gives us hope that there are solutions. Jane Margolis and her colleagues show us the insights that social science can offer us in trying to understand (and meet!) the challenge of broadening participation in computing."--Mark Guzdial, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

About the Author:

Jane Margolis is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She is the coauthor of the award-winning Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing (MIT Press).

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0262135043
• ISBN 13: 9780262135047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200