I was doing my weekly browse of twitter when an article tweeted by an AWSMCS lead caught my eye.

Here is the article: [https://computinged.wordpress.com/2020/02/17/including-race-in-cs-education-research-and-discussion/]

This is funny because it closely mirrors what I have seen and what I just talked about this past week with an administrator. We discussed that even if the elementary school we had started a CS club with was over 50% girls (13 girls, 12 boys) - how many of them were a minority race? And I couldn’t answer because it is hard to assume someone’s race in this day and age so I just didn’t know. Regardless, I can definitely recall anglo and asian making up the majority of the faces I saw there.

We also discussed how even if you have an after-school club, well then how would those people go home? Typically, but not always, underrepresented minorities are also economically disadvantaged; this means they cannot afford to pick their child up everyday after school and the child does not have the means to go home from school by themselves if they live far away. This made me think about if and how could the economically disadvantaged participate in CS at an early age.

Once again if an ethnicity/race is underrepresented in CS, it does not automatically make them socio/economically disadvantaged as well. I do think that would be an interesting data point to see, the correlation between the two.

“There’s a real danger that we’re going to make strong claims about what works and doesn’t work in computer science based only on what works for students in the majority groups. We need to make sure that we include race in our CS education discussions, that we’re taking into account these differentiated experiences. If we don’t, we risk that any improvements or optimizations we make on the basis of these results will only work with the privileged students, or worse yet, may even exacerbate the differentiated experiences.” Here’s the crux of the matter for me. What if these after school programs, well-intentioned they are, do increase female enrollment in CS, but neglect to bring other minorities - racial ones - up as well?

I think one thing that is frustrating is the time it would take me to comb through all the limited data that I have. I understand the reason I do not have access to it, and I can ask for it, but once again another hurdle.