On Saturday, April 12, twenty L.A. charter high school students received an opportunity not easily available to them during the regular school day. The mostly black and Hispanic cohort -- who hailed from three of California’s 18 YouthBuild Charter School of California campuses -- collaborated with technology experts and designers to build Web sites for South L.A. businesses or organizations during WebSlam, held at the Los Angeles Trade Tech College. In the week leading up to the event, the students took intensive classes to learn HTML, CSS, and WordPress, as well as newer programming languages – such as Codea and MIT Media Lab’s Scratch -- essential to Web site creation in the mobile era.
The YouthBuild Charter School of California (YCSC) event did not occur in an educational vacuum. Web design is just one of many lucrative jobs that fall under the rubric of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the education buzzword du jour that’s grabbed the attention of policy-makers, reformers, and edtech pioneers at conferences like GSV Advisors’ Education Innovation Summit, "the Davos in the Desert" underway in Scottsdale, Arizona. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for a STEM job is about $76,000 a year, more than double the salary of the average U.S. worker. As I note in my Forbes post, “Are Hispanics America’s Next Great STEM Innovators?”, “63% of those with only associate’s degrees in STEM earn more than those with bachelor’s degrees in non-STEM occupations. In addition, 47% of those with bachelor’s degrees in STEM occupations earn more than Ph.D.s in non-STEM occupations. Also, there is a much smaller salary gap between men and women in STEM fields than in other occupations. Nevertheless, 3.2 million STEM jobs go unfilled because there are not the qualified applicants to fill them.”
Clearly there is a once-in-a-generation window for America’s urban youth to fill the STEM employment gap. First, however, they need empirically demonstrated STEM skills to compete for these lucrative positions. This is because in a global economy -- where Web outsourcing is commonplace – they are not merely competing against Americans, they are competing against peers in India, China, and other emerging nations who can do Web design and programming at half the price and double the proficiency.
So, what will set America’s urban Web developers apart from their global peers? “Learning to code to us is more than just learning the technology,” said Oscar Menjivar, the warm-hearted CEO of URBAN Teens Exploring Technology (URBAN TxT), which hosted WebSlam with YouthBuild Charter School of California and Colocation America, an L.A.-based web hosting concern.
“At URBAN TxT, coding is about building leadership skills, innovating, and about our kids not having low-paying jobs in the future. We hope to inspire more youth to dream big with technology.” Indeed, it is innovation and dreaming big that keeps California the world STEM capital -- Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Amgen, Jacobs, Qualcomm, Lynda, and Tesla are all based in the Golden State -- even as other nations race ahead in STEM-based training.
Even though American urban students are falling increasingly behind in global measures of science and math learning, their big dreams could still come true right here at home. This is because STEM jobs rank as some of the fastest-growing in the nation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs in domestic STEM fields will grow by more than 1 million by 2022.
In addition, several STEM jobs – especially in Internet and computer fields – still only require a high school diploma or an Associate’s Degree. This means that hard-working urban students can graduate from poverty shortly after graduating from high school. It may also help poor students pay for college – lining themselves up for an even more lucrative career – without the crushing debt that comes with many student loans, as I note in my Forbes piece, "Dude, Where's My Student Loan Bailout?"
Moreover, learning to code not only sets the table for Web-related work, it is also a gateway to STEM fields in general. “Teaching students how to code will help increase math and critical thinking skills and open the door to technology-related jobs,” said Nadia Despenza, YCSC’s STEM Coordinator, and creator of the schools' first WebSlam. “And that will ultimately serve as a pathway out of poverty for many of these talented young people.”
At the April 12 WebSlam, the YCSC students took what they learned in the classroom and applied it under the tutelage of web experts, including impressive mentors from Century-City-based Factual, a location-based data crunching concern. The students had 12 hours to come up with a site for a participating business or organization. A panel of judges, which included industry and community leaders, reviewed the sites for content, accuracy, layout and ease-of-use and awarded prizes to the sites they deemed the best. The winning website -- designed by Michael Taton, Jose Sandoval and Hector Torres – was for Shaquann’s Gourmet Cookies, whose gorgeously photographed creations you'll want to eat right off the screen.
In my one-hour observation of Webslam participants, I saw a high level of student engagement, even as I saw mentors cleaning up some of their errant code. It was a good, if modest, start to making coding cool. But only a start. In my consulting practice, amongst the slew of academic sports I recommend that schools adopt (debate being my top pick), WebSlams are certainly a direct way to get the ball rolling towards making American students competitive on the global STEM stage.
However, as I learned coaching debate in the South Bronx, and as my two documentaries about the experience -- Crotty’s Kids and Master Debaters – make clear, there are several keys to transforming a challenging school day activity into a popular “academic sport.” First, the activity must galvanize animal spirits. That is, students must not only be given a fair, structured, and competently run forum in which to compete, they must have the chance to earn prizes that have unique value to them. Those prizes include not only trophies and medals, but scholarships, gift certificates, and even cash. Students must see a concrete, difficult-to-achieve, payoff to their hard work.
Above all, those who excel must receive genuine public recognition. Repeatedly, I see principals stop the school day for a pep rally for the football or basketball team, but, rarely, if ever, do they do the same for academic athletes in debate, speech, math, chess, robotics, or computer programming. Giving short shrift to academic athletes creates a pernicious cultural barrier to greater student participation, especially in the inner city, where sports stars and entertainers are still the prevailing role models.
Secondly, students must see the activity as one in which they must give their all. Not just one day a week. Not just one weekend a quarter. But every single day for four straight years of high school (even starting in middle school). My best debaters at Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and the Eagle Academy for Young Men worked on debate at least three hours a day. As Malcolm Gladwell notes, it takes 10,000 hours to become fully proficient in any activity. Excellence does not happen overnight. In many cases, America’s urban kids are competing against foreign students who come from cultures that place far greater cultural emphasis on learning, yet who are often, as an Economist study concluded, much worse off economically than America’s poor. Yet their drive to excel is through the roof. This is why it is essential to get urban teens to fully commit to one academic sport, lest their energy be dissipated into several different extracurriculars, instead of one where they could become genuinely proficient.
Finally, leaders of academic sports programs must strip away all rhetoric that paints urban kids as “less than,” or “more disadvantaged,” or as “victims” in need of “special help.” And in their zeal for “social justice,” after-school program leaders must be especially mindful to eschew self-destructive us-versus-them rhetoric that pits “the oppressed” minority kid against those big bad “privileged” kids from suburbia.
None of these tired tropes advance the pressing goal of getting talented young people, from whatever background, to be prepared intellectually, physically, and emotionally for the rigors of both college -- only 9% of poor students entering college actually graduate mainly because they are poorly prepared, noted Laurene Powell Jobs at Tuesday's GSV Summit lunch -- and a merciless global marketplace, where excuses for failure are not tolerated by employers or investors. In the real world, what matters is “the work,” not where you came from.
I really like what Despenza and her team are doing with the WebSlam concept. Their next task is to build a much broader -- participants in this first WebSlam were “pre-selected” -- and rigorous competitive league around it, so that the YouthBuild charges get regular chances throughout the school year to travel to other schools (not just urban schools) and compete against a wide diversity of peers in high-stakes WebSlam competitions, where there are clear winners and losers (and not everyone gets a certificate for just showing up). If this can happen, you could really see computer coding – and perhaps STEM-related extracurriculars in general -- take off in California’s inner city schools.
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And catch Crotty's Kids, May 1o, at The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival
