Silicon Valley is committed to improving computer science education in America’s K-12 schools, and Facebook has pledged another hefty dollar amount to the cause. Last week, Facebook announced it was pledging $15 million over five years to Code.org so the non-profit can train teachers in urban public schools to teach computer science to students who are traditionally underrepresented in the field.

Facebook is partly inspired by the lack of diversity it has within its own company, said THEJournal.

"Only 17 percent of technical workers are women, while 3 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent is African American. For senior leadership, 27 percent are women, 3 percent are African American and 3 percent are Hispanic,” THEJournal said.

Many advocates for computer science education are paying attention to the success Code.org is having since launching in January 2013. Code.org trains thousands of teachers per year ever since and has made it its mission to encourage underrepresented groups to at the very least learn computer science basics.

"According to [Code.org’s CEO Hadi] Partovi, 11 million students have accounts on the website’s Code Studio. Close to 35,000 teachers from 120 school districts have attended Code.org training workshops to learn how to teach computer science in school, making the nonprofit an ideal partner for Facebook's diversity initiative,” said THEJournal.

In addition to investing in Code.org, Facebook also expressed a continual commitment to TechPrep, "an online resource in both English and Spanish for parents, guardians and future programmers who want to learn more about computer science and programming,” it said on its site.

Facebook created TechPrep last October and plans on expanding the site’s community reach moving forward.

Silicon Valley isn’t the only group of entities paying close attention to improving computer science education; computer science also has had a shout-out in the current presidential election.

In Hillary Clinton’s recently-released tech and innovation agenda, the presumed Democratic nominee declared the training of computer science teachers as one of her priorities.

Read the full story here.

Nicole Gorman, Senior Education World Contributor

7/18/2016