Stuck in the Shallow End

by Margolis, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780262514040
• ISBN10: 0262514044
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-04-30
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Winner, Education category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. 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 Endis a story of how inequality is reproduced in America-and how students and teachers, given the necessary tools, can change the system.

Author Biography

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 Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing (MIT Press, 2002).

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: The Myth of Technology as the "Great Equalizer"	p. 1
An Unlikely Metaphor: The Color Line in Swimming and Computer Science	p. 17
Technology Rich, But Curriculum Poor	p. 27
Normalizing the Racial Divide in High School Computer Science	p. 51
Claimed Spaces: "Preparatory Privilege" and High School Computer Science	p. 71
Teachers as Potential Change Agents: Balancing Equity Reform and Systemic Change	p. 97
Technology Policy illusions	p. 117
Conclusion: "The Best and the Brightest"?	p. 133
Afterword	p. 141
Methodology: Process and Reflections	p. 145
Notes	p. 163
References	p. 179
About the Authors	p. 193
Index	p. 195
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