Dive Brief:

• Last month, San Francisco Unified School District announced it would add computer science instruction for all students at every grade level, beginning as early as preschool.
• The district is funding the initiative using a combination of district funds, industry partnerships, and a grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation.
• The classes will begin in some middle schools this fall and will expand from there over the next several years.

Dive Insight:

In an interview with Education Week, James Ryan, the district’s executive director for STEM, said that one of the biggest hurdles to implementing the new initiative was having enough skilled educators to teach the content.

“We have to "school up" the people who are going be teaching it,” Ryan said. District officials partnered with the local teacher union to train teachers. Using a grant from the American Federation of Teachers, the local union added a position intended to specifically support the program.

Adapting computer science for students as young as four or five is a puzzle, but Ryan said that instruction for those students would focus primarily on the kind of thinking that undergirds coding: conditional statements, loops, and more. Students at that age won’t actually write code but will test out the concepts using things like rows of blocks.

The San Francisco program is the first of its kind in the U.S., but Ryan hopes more districts will join in. “The more minds we put to this work, the better product it's going to be for every child. As other districts buy in, we think we'll get better because we'll have more people to bounce ideas off of,” he told Education Week.