Stephane Simon has written an in-depth article about the tech industry’s campaign to promote the tech industry.

Politico writes:

“CODING CONFLICTS OF INTEREST?: A PR campaign that featured an appearance from President Barack Obama on Monday to promote computer science education is raising questions about the motives of the tech-company funders and the growing influence of corporations in public schools. The $30 million campaign touting the need to train more employees for the industry is financed by companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon – even as tech giants lobby Congress for more H-1B visas to bring in foreign programmers. Courses through the campaign’s marketer, the nonprofit Code.org, have not been formally tested but are making their way into tens of thousands of classrooms nationwide. And the coalition is pushing more than a dozen states to count computer science classes toward high school math or science graduation requirements.”

Simon writes:

““Nowhere else in education do we start by saying ‘We have a need for this in the K-5 curriculum because there are good industry jobs at Google,’” said Joanna Goode, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who works on computer science education. “I’m not doing this work to train Google employees.”
Such skepticism hasn’t slowed the industry’s momentum. Founded just last year, Code.org created three introductory programming courses for students in elementary and middle school in a matter of months. The curriculum has not been formally tested — but already, about 60,000 classrooms nationwide already have committed to using it….

“Silicon Valley CEOs have complained for years about a huge shortage of qualified programmers. In its “National Talent Strategy” released in 2012, Microsoft said it had 3,400 unfilled jobs in the U.S. for researchers, developers and engineers. And Zuckerberg has said that Facebook aims “literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” because they’re in short supply.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists numerous categories of computer services as among the fastest-growing careers in the country; those jobs are also generally well-paid.

“Skeptics, however, aren’t convinced that there’s a real shortage — and suggest that tech companies are simply eager to bump up the supply in order to keep their labor costs down.
They note that salaries in the IT industry have not increased, in real terms, since the late 1990s — unlike salaries in other fields, such as petroleum engineering, where the labor market was undeniably tight. Furthermore, only about two-thirds of students who earn college degrees in computer and information sciences take jobs in that field within a year of graduation, according to an analysis by Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/hour-of-code-schools-obama-113408.html#ixzz3LQUUSsq1

Note:

Jeb Bush is one of the biggest boosters of online learning, virtual charters, and graduation requirements for online courses. His Foundation for Educational Excellence is funded in large part by the tech industry.