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Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing | 
 enlarge | Author: Jane Margolis
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 248664
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 201
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0262135043
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.071
EAN: 9780262135047
ASIN: 0262135043
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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 End is a story of how inequality is reproduced in America?and how students and teachers, given the necessary tools, can change the system.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Computer Science enrollment, has been down everywhere November 4, 2008
Donald Hsu (NYC, United States)
not just in high schools, but in all universities and colleges in USA. Margolis showed low participation among African Americans and Latino students in computer science in the three high schools during her research.
The overall major in CS/IS/IT is about 0.7% (from report of Association Computing Machinery). Professors have been conducting SPSS reviews, discussed in conferences and tried to find solutions to reverse this trend since 2004.
If no one studies CS/IS/IT, then it is understandable that very few of them will be women, blacks, hispanics (WBL).
WBL were not interested due to the lack of math skills, the negative perception of the field, the image of a nerd sitting behind the computer, the lack of role models. Most of CS/IS/IT professors are white males, therefore, WBL could not relate to them.
The bigger issue, is what does everyone major? Business is still number one, with 23-30 percent in every university. The reason, Business is easier than CS/IS/IT. Another reason, most students in high school or college, took the first computer course, they normally got bad experience. Why? The teacher/professor who has been a nerd all his life, cannot teach.
Is there a solution? Yes, you need to hire inspiring teacher/professor in high school/college. You need to hire WBL that are successful role models. The job market in CS/IS/IT is crucial for attracting interest.
US government, industry, business and academic have to work together to reverse this trend. Otherwise, we are just turning every college graduate to be doing menial jobs.
 You Don't Need to Be a Nerd To Need to Read This Book September 26, 2008
Christine Stephenson
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a germinal work for anyone who cares about the critical intersections of education, race, and computing. It is shocking and sad and uplifting and it is essential reading for educators, administrators, parents, community leaders, policy makers, and anyone who cares about the future. Margolis and her team show that when it comes to education and computing, the emperor has no clothes. Schools may be filled with shiny new machines but this is no guarantee that students are learning the high level critical thinking skills they require. The writers also lay bare a pervasive and systemic racism that virtually guarantees that even the best and brightest minority students receive nothing more than rudimentary point and click computing education, severely diminishing their abilities to succeed at the post secondary level and to thrive in the increasingly technological world in which we live. Set all of this in a bureaucratic quagmire where actually educating the students (rather than just managing them) is a near impossibility and one begins to feel as though this is a hopeless situation. But this is where Stuck in the Shallow End actually triumphs. In the midst of grim reality it offers hope, showing how researchers, teachers, and administrators can work together to acknowledge and overcome the ingrained inequalities that keep so many of our students from achieving their full potential. And it should also be mentioned that this is not just a thoughtful book, it is also extremely well-written and accessible, even to the most dedicated non-techie.
This is a must read book!! September 23, 2008
Pattie Heyman
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a must read book! As technology as become so intrinsic to us all, and our society has become ever more multi-cultural, this book is a lens on critical social issues of today---from disparities of opportunity to how segregation happens. For those of you who are not computer scientists (like me!), it could be easy to rule yourself out as a reader of this book, but actually the issued raised in Stuck in the Shallow End are intrinsic to all of our lives. And, who would have thought that you could compare what is happening in computing to the history of segregation in swimming? By, comparing the segregation in these two activities throughout the book, the authors awaken us to social divides all around us that we often take for granted, or just stop seeing. I strongly recommend this book for any and all readers who are concerned with our educational system, with issues of race and equity, and for those who want to learn something really new and important.
great read on the state of computing education in American high schools! September 22, 2008
Sarita Yardi (Atlanta, GA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is engaging and inspiring. Margolis and her research team spent three years immersed in three high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. As a former student in a similar large, public southern California high school, I distinctly remember seeing the gradual decline of African American and Latino students in the advanced courses from the 7th-12th grade. At the time, I had little understanding of why this happened, and even now, am surprised to learn how many complex factors influenced this decline. The picture hasn't changed much since then. Even now, the National Science Foundation is currently funding a nationwide Broadening Participation in Computing program among researchers to address exactly these questions.
Margolis' book reveals the structural inequalities that influence the low participation among African Americans and Latino/a students in receiving higher ed degrees in computer science. While the lack of
women and minorities in computing and technical careers is an oft-cited statistic, we understand far less about the multiple factors that cause such unequal participation. Margolis' insights into the many hidden causes of why students of certain backgrounds face an increasingly uphill battle is profound, and sometimes shocking.
It is easy to look for surface level explanations for this decline of interest but this book reveals how complex and daunting the equation is. It reveals a number of structural problems in detail: the implications of having so few teachers trained to teach high school Computer Science, how throwing hardware (i.e new computers) doesn't automatically entice students into becoming computer scientists, how teaching computer literacy "cut and paste" skills doesn't teach them to develop advanced computational thinking skills, how the subtle manifestation of racial prejudices discourages students' participation in Computer Science. Margolis does not place blame on teachers, students, parents, school administrations, or any other individual, but shows how underlying structural factors creates this often bleak picture of Computer Science education at the high school level.
While this book focuses on three schools in the LA school district, the takeaways are relevant to educators, researchers, and parents across the country. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to understand many of the underlying problems in high school Computer Science. But even more so, anyone who wants an insightful and readable exploration of the state of high school education in America will find this book inspiring and motivating.
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