Mayor de Blasio in the Bronx to discuss education plan

Mayor De Blasio added that the plan, “speaks to the reality of the world we live in now”.

The mayor also unveiled a plan to give more city students the opportunity to learn computer science.

The city’s Department of Education estimates that fewer than 10 percent of its schools offer computer science and that only 1% of students end up actually receiving computer-science education.

“Every city dollar will be matched by one from the private sector”, de Blasio said.

The move to incorporate computer science into the educations of the 1.1 million students served by the public school system reflects the growing value of programming skills and concerns about a lack of diversity in the booming tech economy.

The goal is for all students, even those in elementary and in the poorest neighborhood schools, to have some exposure to computer science, building a stronger workforce that has a larger number of minority and female employees.

De Blasio will speak with 15 seventh and eighth graders from Mississippi 223 in the South Bronx at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, along with computer science teacher Ben Samuels-Kalow, who is a former student of city schools chancellor Carmen Fariña.

The mayor will also announce other STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) initiatives.

Chicago wants a yearlong computer science course to be a high school graduation requirement by 2018, which is far beyond what de Blasio proposes. Past mayors not only ignored inequity, but made it worse.

Google and Microsoft have both donated to Chicago’s effort.

Delivering on his proposal may be hard for the Mayor to implement, despite tech industry encouragement.

The administration says right now, too many schools do not have the resources to ensure they are computer-science proficient.

The National Science Foundation intends to train 10,000 teachers to teach the subject, though the issue, of course, is that anyone sufficiently knowledgable in the field would often prefer the higher paycheck that often comes with working directly in it.