$500 MILLION DOLLARS - Smarter Every Day 179

five hundred million dollars that's a lot of money if someone just handed you five hundred million dollars and said here go do something good for society what would you do I don't know if you know it but society is kind of divided right now it's like we're on different teams and when we're on teams we tend to play games right I don't like to even touch politics because of this division this polarization but just as a thought experiment look at this graph there's two teams there's the blue team and the red team where would you put yourself on this graph you might find yourself over here on the left or maybe over here on the right or somewhere in between whatever you're into that's cool but I kind of look at it a little bit differently I'm not really on the graph I don't really care what team gets the credit and I don't even really want to play the game I want to be a part of those things that are just in arguably good when I was at university for mechanical engineering it was pretty much understood that if you were to graduate you would have a job because there was a deficit of engineers to fill engineering jobs eight years later my sister went through university and she read the market forces differently she chose computer science I thought it would be interesting to get her perspective on what it's like to be a female computer scientist hey guys Destin asked me to make a quick clip about women in computer science but the thing is I'm actually really busy computer science thing as we speak I really need to format this aggregation right now I can't make a video clip so that's all she gave me she kind of messed my script up so here's how this works she's too busy working she is a senior software engineer her opening salary was a hundred and fifty percent what mine was when I graduated adjusted for inflation and everything if you want a job when you graduate computer science is the ticket Google invited me via email to this event industry leaders from all different types of companies and government leaders were coming together to ball up 500 million stinking dollars and allocate it to get coding into schools this is a big deal because in the current loaded political tribalism environment this this email invite I got look like a breath of fresh air it looked like people working together so yeah I'll put on a suit and go to Detroit and listen to people working together for something I agree with so this is what that looks like hey it's me Destin welcome back to smarter every day I'm in Detroit today I have been asked to come to an event about computer science for children it's put on by code.org the internet Association a lot of a lot of groups have come together it's a big deal so there's 500 million dollars that's being given specifically to focus on computer science literacy for minorities young girls and rural students so I'm in Detroit Ivanka Trump's gonna be here in a second we're gonna talk about what all is going on and I'm gonna watch this event first and then we'll all talk about it this guy is Michael Beckerman he's the president and CEO of something called the internet Association the internet Association is responsible for getting all these industry partners together to donate all this money this is how we kick things off a new initiative creating a large funding for computer science and stem programming and that would have been possible without the leadership and vision of the banca Trump is with us today so I just wanted to thank Ivanka as well thank you for you've done after this the panelists came up and I'll summarize exactly what went down Google Amazon Microsoft Facebook in Salesforce dot org each gave 50 million bucks Lockheed Martin gave 25 million Accenture gave over 10 million and General Motors and plural sites are given 10 million there were a lot of things said on this stage but the one thing that was very clear is everyone was unified on this one particular topic pathways for a job for all Americans even those who walked out of a four-year college model for my money Hadi partovi from code.org seemed to sum it up the best this guy's been beating this drum for years and you could tell this was a really big moment for him listen the way he had to say Americans expect the tech industry to address some of these things and today they're putting their money where their mouth is to do that and on top of that the administration is coming together in a really unique public-private partnership that we don't really see in our country very often you know our country lives we're living in divided times everybody knows that but everybody agrees on the idea that every American should have the opportunity as a student to have a great career in front of them and the school they go to should prepare them for that place where no matter where they want to get into so I I wanted to thank Ivanka personally for championing this and being for such a champion particularly of diversity for girls for African Americans for Hispanic Americans who have the least access to this opportunity today I want to point out something right now somehow I don't know how this happened but in society right now we have come to believe that if you agree with a person on a topic somehow you're signaling to the rest of the world that you agree with everything that person thinks on every topic that's simply not true it's okay to say that something that's good is good I'll give you an example this makes me look bad so maybe you'll believe it more on this channel in particular I've done a video in the past saying that one particular practice that Facebook was doing was inequitable and I disagreed with it it was a very strong video but here Facebook has given 50 million dollars for computer science education that is a good thing and people might say whatever it's a PR stunt I don't care what people think you've given 50 million dollars to computer science education and that is a good thing no matter what anybody says by the way all these companies that don't traditionally agree with some of the policies of the current administration are sitting down with Ivanka Trump everybody's on stage doing a good thing this is exactly what I want the future to look like they're all listening to each other and speaking of that we should I actually got to go meet some of these people 101 and listen to them this is really fun I like this I came to this country as an as an immigrant from Iran and my family is leaving during a time of war I came here as a 12 year old with my twin brother and we had nothing to our name but I other than my ability to code and thirty years later I've made more money than I need and I've started companies that employ thousands of Americans all because I learned voting in computer science and the person who taught me was my dad and the reason I started code org is most Americans aren't going to learn coding and computer science from their dad if computer science is taught in schools not only will every American have the opportunity we can also address the diversity issues about who goes into the field okay I'm here with Mary from Microsoft and you had some good one liners there during the panel one of them you said is like a goal without a plan is just a wish right right and I will say I will say it now that I took that from Melinda French Gates who also has been just such a strong leader for women and driving diversity in the workplace too but nonetheless it's really true once we set a goal we need to really have indicators to ensure that we're going to meet those goals and my goal is that in five years there's computer science in every single high school and that we have teachers who are also representative that we have women teachers and that we have young people of color teaching computer science okay regardless of political background we can all agree that smart kids is something that we all want it so I'm here with Michael from the internet Association and Ivanka Trump but you guys government and industry just came together we're talking 500 million dollars to teach young girls and minorities and rural areas have a code right yeah absolutely well seneschal memorandum a minimum of two hundred million dollars annually and the private sector also announced an enormous contribution today towards computer science education we're super passionate about coding we think that the jobs of the future will require this technical skill set and I'm also really excited that the presidential memorandum requires that the Department of Education considers inclusion in the design of these programs because we need to encourage gender and racial diversity in a scale of which unfortunately women's participation has been moving in the wrong direction in recent years and we only represent a little over 22% of the computer science field so hopefully this will take a big step in changing that dynamic these are these are jobs for everybody as Ivanka pointed out and her leadership has been absolutely incredible there are four are from sight they're 500,000 open computer science jobs across the country and that's in agriculture and banking sectors outside of technology yet we're only graduating 50 thousand students a year less than half of the schools or teaching computer science but all the parents 90 percent of parents want their kids to learn this and so this is important for kids every kid across the country you're here in Detroit in every community regardless you want to go into tech or not and the leadership that Ivanka administration has shown has been absolutely incredible and it's it's just great to be here representing the private sector no matching this commitment as well and working together that's awesome that's that's what I'm really excited about everybody working together regardless of political differences to do the right thing which is educate the future it's really good and I'm a father as well we've got four kids and so I can relate to all the stuff you guys have going on it's a big deal my sister's a computer science yeah I'm really excited about it so I really appreciate your time thank you very much thank you very much appreciate it one final thought here do you remember that political graph I feel like I have a really unique perspective right now because recently I've done something interesting on both sides of that graph last year for example I met with President Barack Obama and like anyone in life I had things that I agreed with him on and things that had disagreed with him on but I chose to focus on the good things and we made progress together I had the exact same experience with Ivanka Trump she is a sharp competent woman who just used her position of leadership to accomplish some great things on a topic I care about computer science my point is this if we focus on our disagreements there will be no progress but if we actually take the time and listen to each other then we can work together with the things that we do agree on only then are we really gonna make the future smarter every day and I think we can all agree that that is in arguably good you probably thinking what's the deal Destin did you just make this video to virtue signal and feel better about yourself no no but did not were you not listening there's 500 freakin million dollars that you didn't know existed a few minutes ago and we can funnel that into your local school they kind of like spend it right so they're trying to figure out how they're gonna allocate this money so I'm gonna leave links in the video description student be smart about this mom dad teacher administrator don't wait on anybody else to do this go to the link enter your school tell them everything they need to know let's figure out how to get a coding curriculum in your local school you don't even have to have kids or even be connected to the school put the stuff in there let's figure out how to get coding into schools when we go to Mars there's gonna be millions of lines of code on that vehicle and it's gonna be done by this generation so use the leaks get the money and learn to code the future is yours you can do it I promise anyway I'm Destin you're getting smarter every day have a good one and everybody just be nice to each other look at what we're doing when we're nice to each other it's awesome anyway

Channel: SmarterEveryDay

Views: 1,640,671

Keywords: Smarter, Every, Day, Science, Physics, Destin, Sandlin, Education, Math, Smarter Every Day, experiment, nature, demonstration, slow, motion, slow motion, education, math, science, science education, what is science, Physics of, projects, experiments, science projects, Computer Science, code.org

Id: G6N5DZLDja8

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/DoListening]

Can someone familiar with the topic explain how it is going to be used? Funding education is of course a good thing, but is money really the bottleneck here?

The video is just 12 minutes of the guy saying "omg this is so amazing".

[u/Cummiekazi]

I've never really understood the whole "Every child should learn to code" movement. Who does it help besides the owners of huge tech companies who won't have to pay such high rates for devs.

We don't fight for nursing or teaching to be taught in school so why coding??

[u/tonefart]

They want to drive down the salary of software engineers. That's the only reason to attempt to turn every tom dick and harry into programmers.

[u/TweakedNipple]

If they paid people in IT properly they wouldn't need to fund schools, look at lawyers.

[u/Andreas0607]

Okey, so I am 17 going to a high school in Chula Vista, California. And it is noticable that the computer science class has a lot better funding than the rest of my classes. I'd say I am okey experienced in programming so I know what it takes to learn it. But in computer science the problem isn't bad computers or not good enough software. It is the teachers. My computer science-teacher barely knows any HTML, css or js. And he has no clue what JSON data is. All we've been doing this year is working with programs like scratch, a canvas drawing app where you drag and drop blocks. I see a lot of students in my class with a lot of potential and especially interest in the subject that has lost encouragement by doing waaaaay too easy tasks. So money isn't really the problem, it is the competence of the teacher

[u/claypigeon-alleg]

I'm a high school math/computer teacher, and I've taught programming for most of my career. I am appropriately certified to teach both, which means at least an undergraduate degree in the area of content (I double majored)

Glancing over the comments, I have a few general thoughts (bolded for TL;DR)

A one-time investment is a good thing, but the real (and lasting) expense in education is staffing. Nearly 85% of our district's budget is salaries, and that's pretty typical for public education. You need lots of people to make a school work, and you need to pay those people in salary and benefits. Those expenses add up really quickly.

Yes, you do need to pay for a lab of computer every few years. Drop 15-20k, and you'll have a lab of pretty nice machines that lasts 4 or 5 years. A 25k + benefits salary will eclipse that cost in a year.

Qualified staff is lacking. Again, I really only have my district as reference, so feel free to correct me with actual statistics. We have approximately 300 certified staff teaching 4100+ students from across the district. Maybe 5 staff (including me) are qualified to teach programming in any capacity. I'm the only person actively teaching coding. Another teacher advises the robotics team, which has a coding component. That's about it. If I'm out for any length of time, there really isn't a qualified sub to replace me.

There are reasons for this. My belief is that salaries (again) are the main reason. Our district pays relatively well, and a first year teacher with a BA earns 35k in exchange 60-70 hour work weeks, 40 of which are spent being responsible for the well-being of a semi-hostile audience (2% of which have crazy parents that consume most of your time and energy). Oh, and you need to complete a graduate degree in ___ years.

And you need to take a bunch of extra coursework to even qualify for this delicious proposition.

Yes, the benefits are awesome, but when you're 20 and comparing this against a 40-50k salary and 40-ish hour work week... you've got to really want to be a teacher to do it. I was the first person from my undergrad program to graduate with a certification to teach.

Unless a foundation commits to massive long-term funding, I'm not sure a single donation is going to make much impact

Despite all of this teaching SOME coding is important, because it builds aptitude for computers. For all of this talk of "gee whiz, kids are so good with computers," I can report from the front lines that kids are good enough with technology to screw around on their phone. They don't understand files. There is some basic understanding of Word-like and PowerPoint-like applications, but that's the extent of it.

Programming makes you confront these things, along with building a general appreciation of how un-intelligent a computer is.

Edit for markdown

[u/deftware]

Spend it all on VR as an education tool! YOU CAN'T GO WRONG!

[u/alsomahler]

Is there an idea of how the money is going to be spent and what percentage it is of the entire education budget?

So a commitment of over $300M over the next 5 years for K-12, plus the $200M The Presidential Memorandum.

In fall 2017, about 50.7 million students will attend public elementary and secondary schools. Of these, 35.6 million will be in prekindergarten through grade 8 and 15.1 million will be in grades 9 through 12. An additional 5.2 million students are expected to attend private elementary and secondary schools.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

Assuming the enrollments remain the same for the next 5 years this should benefit ~250 million students. That's almost a $2 investment per student.

Computer hardware may become obsolete quite fast, but with some smart spending you could buy a lot of toys or iPad apps that could teach kids coding by having fun.

Students typically enter American high schools in 9th grade. Teachers. Public school systems will employ about 3.2 million full-time-equivalent (FTE) teachers in fall 2017, such that the number of pupils per FTE teacher—that is, the pupil/teacher ratio—will be 16.1.

Still most of this will need to be spent on hiring or re-educating teachers and this would pay for $150 of education budget per teacher. The time spent on these topics, will also cut into the budget and time for other material.

These calculations might be way off, but it does matter where the money goes in order for it to be useful. I would hate to see everybody being excited by this high sounding amount, when in reality there is a risk that is not going to change much or just hurt existing programs.

[u/Dbviana733]

Please stop encouraging everyone to go into CS. It's wrong and damaging to the industry... Not everyone is meant to program, let people decide for themselves...