Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing

The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate andadvanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low, according to recentsurveys. And relatively few African American and Latino/a high school studentsreceive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities, andpreparation needed for them to choose computer science as a field of study andprofession. In Stuck in the Shallow End, Jane Margolis looks at the dailyexperiences of students and teachers in three Los Angeles public high schools: anovercrowded urban high school, a math and science magnet school, and a well-fundedschool in an affluent neighborhood. She finds an insidious "virtualsegregation" that maintains inequality. Two of the three schools studied offeronly low-level, how-to (keyboarding, cutting and pasting) introductory computingclasses. The third and wealthiest school offers advanced courses, but very fewstudents 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 occupationaland educational futures. Margolis traces the interplay of school structures (suchfactors as course offerings and student-to-counselor ratios) and belief systems --including teachers' assumptions about their students and students' assumptions aboutthemselves. Stuck in the Shallow End is a story of how inequality is reproduced inAmerica -- and how students and teachers, given the necessary tools, can change thesystem.