Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing (Mit Press)

During the summer of 2014, I attended a Tapestry Workshop, a program designed to attract diverse students to computing, on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science. At the weeklong training program, teachers and professors presented strategies that they have found to be effective in recruiting African American, Hispanic, and female students into computer science; the speakers were inspirational. The teachers who attended the workshop were provided with resources, too, such as the book Stuck in the Shallow End. More important, I decided to read the book to find out how I could recruit diverse students to my AP Computer Science class. At the beginning of the school year, I approached my administrators about offering an AP computer science course. I met with the principal and assistant principal of instruction to present the benefits of the class. The principal had taught science, which is rare; most administrators do not have a background in STEM, and it didn’t take much to convince her of the importance of the class. In addition, I convinced counselors of the importance of getting underrepresented students into the AP Computer Science class through casual conversations. It was harder to convince the assistant principal of instruction because I don’t think she had a STEM background, and she had to consider the scheduling implications of offering the class. In the end, the principal of instruction decided to offer the class to a group of 22 students who were African American, Hispanic, and females. Surprisingly, it is not hard to get students interested in computer science, especially if I can show them some of the applications of the subject. For example, I developed a presentation about computer science using information I obtained from the Tapestry Workshop that included Sphero, a robot that is controlled by an app on a smartphone. I think the students were impressed by the salaries of computer scientists and the future prospects of computer science as a career field, but Sphero was a rock star. More than that, after my presentation to an analytic geometry class, students from all over the school heard about Sphero and would interrupt my class to see Sphero perform. I used some of the strategies in Stuck in the Shallow End to offer AP Computer Science to students who I think would not otherwise have taken this course. Yet as I taught them, I noticed one glaring weakness in the book and my teaching: we had both completely ignored the students. Frederick Douglass speech said it best in 1883 to a congressional church in Washington D. C.: “If we find, we shall have to seek. If we succeed in the race of life, it must be by our own energies, and our exertions. Others may clear the road, but we must go forward, or be left behind in the race of life.” What I think he was trying to say is that students have the most responsibility for their success. The book and the national debate on how to increase the number of underrepresented groups in computer science have ignored the fact that students, regardless of their background, have some accountability for their success.

I read Stuck in the Shallow End as a precursor to conducting undergraduate research on women in computing. While this book was about race instead of gender, it opened my eyes to issues of inequity to which I would have been otherwise ignorant.Overall Stuck in the Shallow End did its job in communicating the deep inequities faced by minorities in the high school environment. I especially appreciated the parallel history of swimming inequity. It provided a powerful framework from which to think about computing and race.Overall I did find the book to be a bit repetitive with its themes and felt, at times, that I was reading the same thing I had read in a previous chapter. In the same vein, I felt the content was stretched out over too many pages without enough new insights being drawn.All of this being said, it was a fairly well written piece of research, with findings that we should all heed, both in the education and computing communities.

Margolis and company have led an incredibly effective program to engage Black, Hispanic, and female students in computer science. This book reveals how the underlying problems they discovered were causing minorities and women to be underrepresented in the CS pipeline. Profiling three very different schools, they find that each school channels the majority of talent away from computer science, but in different ways. Teachers from any school will find unexpected reflections of themselves and their school in Stuck in the Shallow End, and in the end will put down the book with greater insight into how their school's programs might be contributing to the problem. An important book to read for educators and systemic thinkers, its lessons apply not only to computer science but to all fields in which women and minorities are under-represented.I've mentioned my high regard for Stuck in the Shallow End to several leaders in computer science education. All gave a surprisingly similar response: "That book changed my career." Through this book, our efforts to address a national crisis -- in which we find ourselves devastatingly short on people with the skills or interest in computer science -- become a direct descendant of the civil rights work that inspired a generation. A must-read.

Great resource as we rethink what an equitable education is all about.

Wow. I read this book because it was required. I expected to learn a thing or to, and hoped to gain a few ideas.What a shock. I was completely wrong, about a great many things it seems. A curtain has been lifted from my eyes. This is a must read. For every American alive today. Thanks!

The parallel of the inequity in swimming over the past century to education really was intriguing. As a person who has been working to address inequity in education reform, this book provided yet another complexity to be mindful of related to technology integration. The best of intentions, if not embraced properly, can create further divisions in education. Any education leader who is considering reform efforts, especially technology as an equalizer, needs to read this book and truly evaluate the strategic implementation of such an initiative.

Great book all teachers should read

Good book