Bill Introduced To Replace West Virginia's New CS Course Graduation Requirement With Computer Literacy Proficiency
- Reference: 0180787000
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/13/1424257/bill-introduced-to-replace-west-virginias-new-cs-course-graduation-requirement-with-computer-literacy-proficiency
- Source link:
> West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced [2]House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being [3]opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org , which [4]lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI education alongside traditional CS, teaming up with tech CEOs and leaders last year to launch a national campaign to [5]mandate CS and AI courses as graduation requirements .
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> "It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a [6]Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS.
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> The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced [7]a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy , abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~theodp
[2] https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Text_HTML/2026_SESSIONS/RS/bills/hb5387%20intr.pdf
[3] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14t55uMXyLMF7GW_dz9bUW-u-eZQlUbWSQAUjKxvpc0s/present?slide=19
[4] https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/2025/committee/public_comments/Hedu/HB2411_3-3-PC.pdf
[5] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/04/1323220/codeorg-changes-mission-to-make-cs-and-ai-a-core-part-of-k-12-education
[6] https://advocacy.code.org/coalition-archives/
[7] https://www.computingatschool.org.uk/forum-news-blogs/2025/november/car-final-report-summary/
West Virginia (Score:3)
West Virginia needs to stop doing whatever the hypest corporation tells it to do.
Re: (Score:1)
Well what should states do as far as secondary ed?
I think we can all agree that ensuring all graduates can in fact read well, posses some number sense in the form of statistics, be able to do common algebra, and perhaps basic differential calculus, and know some things about the natural sciences.
Most states are failing pretty hard at that and our education-industrial-complex finds all manor of excuses ranging from more-inflation-adjusted-spending-per-pupil than at any point in history just isn't enough, to
Re: (Score:2)
Teaching everyone to program is a good idea in my opinion, but my opinion is not science.
It should be incorporated into the curriculum based on scientific analysis that carefully evaluates the entire curriculum, not because OpenAI is now the hottest company in The Beltway.
Re:West Virginia (Score:5, Insightful)
As a child you have no idea what you want to do with your life. The goal of high school should be both to educate in critical areas (reading, math, social studies, financial literacy, health, etc) but also to expose students to the broadest amount of trades possible. I think students should spend time writing code as much as they should spend time disecting an animal, mixing a chemical, or welding. Only through doing can we learn what our passion is.
If a student never experiences something how can they decide to do it as a career?
Re: (Score:2)
> West Virginia needs to stop doing whatever the hypest corporation tells it to do.
Corporation? Our own government the last 5 years or so took the position that every kid should learn to code, because there was no future in things like, oh, honest manual work. AI has fucked the assumptions of everyone from the halls of Congress all the way to Silicon Valley.
I'm fine with this (Score:3)
Not everybody needs to know how to program, and those people who were being forced into taking a CS class were likely never going to be all that good at it.
If anything, they were likely creating the next generation of managers who think that they understand IT because they took one college course in it. They know just enough to have dangerous assumptions, but not enough knowledge to be genuinely useful.
Learing by Example. (Score:2)
> Not everybody needs to know how to program, and those people who were being forced into taking a CS class were likely never going to be all that good at it.
> If anything, they were likely creating the next generation of managers who think that they understand IT because they took one college course in it. They know just enough to have dangerous assumptions, but not enough knowledge to be genuinely useful.
(Reality) "You know, not everyone can be a manager."
(College Campus) "You know, we call them administrators here."
Why are they wrong? (Score:2)
> "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those."
They are probably correct. The reality is that trying to make "coding" a forced part of graduation for 100% of students, to me, seems very extreme. Especially when the majority of them will actually never code afterwards. And also especially in an AI era where a lot of
Re: (Score:2)
Literacy means understanding more than facts and algorithms: It's understanding intent (logos, pathos, ethos). That requires a broad knowledge of the language, which can't be taught, it is experienced by seeing/reading more complex patterns/algorithms.
> ... must be at an all-time low.
I think most parents fail to teach the finer details of everyday life: Money and sex and law are the obvious ones. I met many teens who left home barely able to cook and clean. Their views on crime/policing, politics and religion was usually a copy of the
Literacy coding anyway in this context (Score:2)
I would argue that this is a better choice. People need to know basics of things, like backups, personal security, 2FA, dealing with the ever growing onslaught of scams, phishing attempts, and many other things. A CS course provides far less value than a basic user education course.
Let CS be a thing, but first teach safeguards and how not to get obliterated by a criminal org first.
Will cover important fundamentals? (Score:2)
What's the chances this new "computer literacy proficiency" won't actually cover useful proficiency? Some very basic aspect I would expect a student to know:
1. What is encryption? How to protect yourself using it.
2. How to verify identity online, using technology such as PGP.
3. How to read and understand software licensing and privacy policies.
4. How to understand unsafe data handling practices.
5. Why open standards matter. For instance, why you should use ODF instead of DOCX.
6. How to pick privacy
Re: (Score:2)
I predict exactly none of that will be covered anywhere. It's hard to call that "basic" literacy when 99% of the population has barely ever heard of those topics.
Re: (Score:2)
Not hearing about something doesn't mean it's not basic. If I asked the average homeowner to get me a #2 Robertson screwdriver, could they? Would they know there are different indexed sizes? Would they know what a Robertson even looks like? How often do you hear Phillips called the Star, even though there is an actual Star that is not Phillips. That's a great example of something basic, that many people don't know, I bet 99% of homeowners don't know the correct driver to use for the lug connectors on t
Re: (Score:2)
You have some practical points, but that is a really boring curriculum. Try to make it interesting.
> Cheers to freedom beers :)
Are those French?
Re: (Score:2)
I write a lot of IT courses, and when I have to cover licensing and privacy policy, I paint pictures.
> Imagine if a company demanded you install a camera in your bedroom, that you couldn't turn off, cover, or obscure.
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> You have no access to the feed from the camera, when it's on, or what it captures. You have no control over what happens to the video, who it's shared with, and how it's analyzed. Furthermore, you have to take on pure faith the good intentions of the company.
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> Do you trust them, would you go ahead with accepting that policy?
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> Of course not, but many privacy policies are effectively no better, and now imagine it's not your bedroom, it's your child's, and it becomes clear why you need to carefully review privacy policies.
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> For anyone who thinks your government will protect you, if the company baselessly claims they won't hand out the video, or misuse the contents, that generally satisfies the majority of federal security policy.
If you read that, and still find privacy policy boring, you're not paying attention. The amount of kick back I get to that kind of explanation is actually ridiculous, being in that course, I break down the Monday.com privacy policy, and show how it's so invasive, and violating that Epstein would get a hard on.
On the Monday.com privacy policy, they outright state they'll digitally stock you using third-pa
Re: (Score:2)
This is pretty advanced. What ought to happen is teach kids different things in different stages
- In primary school, teach kids binary math and Boolean algebra. Namely binary, octal and hexadecimal arithmetic and logic, as well as operations such as AND, OR, NOT and XOR
- In secondary school, teach kids about circuits. Starting w/ switches, how an open switch represents a zero and a closed switch a 1 (or vice-versa, depending on the circuit). Also how a circuit can be designed to form AND, OR, NAND, NO
Re: (Score:2)
I really don't think my list is advanced, we teach at that level in other areas. Why can English, Math, History, or SexEd get that treatment, but when it comes to your digital liberty and safety, it's okay to blame the computer and be ignorant?
Cutting down on the liberal studies is a good idea, we don't have enough technical courses available at the secondary level, that help supplement an education for a person who doesn't need to read Shakespeare, or learn about WW2 / WW1 in detail. What good does fo
Squishy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bit hard to judge this change, to the degree it is one; because both 'CS' and 'computer literacy' are both extremely vulnerable to being squished into almost anything people want them to be. Sure, in an ideal world, 'CS' is a branch of mathematics focused on complexity, computability, information, some formal logic, potentially the number theory required for hashing and cryptography; but it routinely gets slapped on everything from super hardcore academic mathematics to 'bootcamp' language-fad-of-the-week, to 'how do I excel even? 101'; and when it's a graduation requirement you need to get everyone past it's probably being softballed a bit.
'Computer literacy' is a fuzzier term to start out with; and can range from terrifyingly basic "how do I press button on android 16?" quasi-vocational stuff; to various product-focused but less trivial things (autocad or arcGIS say) to things that have much less to do with computers specifically and would historically have been taught as some sort of 'media literacy', quite possibly by the school librarian(not that most people really need to know dewey decimal in any detail; but library science programs are often excellent groundings in knowing how to sensibly deal with data sources to obtain actual knowledge).
Whether this change is good or bad seems like it hinges more or less entirely on what they meant by 'CS' previously and what they will mean by 'computer literacy' now. If the old plan was to genuinely attempt to turn high schoolers into apprentice line of business java slingers that is probably worth abandoning; but if they abandon "we'll be thinking about how to decompose a desired outcome into a series of steps, using python as an example" with "how to chat with chatbots" they will be doing the students a considerable disservice.
They can't even read... (Score:3)
How are they going to understand a programming language?
Re: (Score:2)
"ChatGPT can you 'asplain this here code thingy?"
Re: (Score:2)
The downfall of what will probably not much longer be a global power. Sad to watch.
They are done with us (Score:2)
Or at least they certainly think they are. The entire point of the cs requirement was to lower wages by flooding the market with programmers. They don't think they need to do that anymore.
Most of your complaints about education and college or because colleges are built to serve the needs of big business and not your kids. If you look at the experience at a extremely expensive college it is very different than the one you get at a public university especially these days.
The wealthy tell you to skip c
Will they warn not to trust LLMs? (Score:2)
If so, then I think this will be a really good thing.
Just as well. (Score:2, Insightful)
AI is going to take all the CS jobs anyway. Might as well bring back vocational programs in coal mining, considering all the energy these AI data centers will need.