Programming is not math

In academic research, nobody cares about education. The big universities that you think of as education powerhouses like Stanford, MIT, CMU, are all at heart research universities. Their faculty were not hired because of their skill as educators, but as scientists. In the training of research faculty (starting in undergrad through grad school and their postdocs) there is very little emphasis or formal mentoring or training on teaching students. Sure, you might TA a class, but this is usually seen as an inconvenience to be discharged as quickly and efficiently as possible, and some programs allow students to get their PhD without ever TAing a single class.

Why do they not care though? Well, educating undergrads won't get you tenure or grant money or publications. These are all the yardsticks that we use to measure faculty success. Wait, don't we use student evaluations? Oh sure, but you know what gets good student evaluations? Giving everyone good grades.

In a larger sense though, most don't care about the study of education. Education research is de-prioritized and de-funded and education researchers and grad students are mocked for lacking intellectual rigor. Undergraduate education majors are not helping - walk past an undergrad education classroom and you could find college students creating paper mache volcanoes. No joke. Some of this is because education research is really hard, both scientifically and politically.

Politically, education research is undermined by everyone. If you are a researcher and you want to study how K-12 education works, for example, you obviously need the permissions of administrators and teachers at a school. Trying to get this permission will set off a powder keg. The administrators might be supportive, or they might think that your findings will be used by NCLB to justify shutting their school down. Teachers won't be supportive at all, they will see your research as an attempt to gather data about their job performance, this will play into the hyper-adversarial relationship between administration and the teachers union, and you will never see the inside of a high school as an education researcher except on PTA nights. I'm pretty sure that nationally this research is not funded as robustly as say efforts to make robots fight with giant lasers because policy people don't really want to know when their efforts are not working and the thought of independent and critical scientists studying the education system terrifies them.

So, as a young researcher, when you sit down with your adviser and say "but nobody knows how our students learn programming", they will forcefully explain the way the world works to you, and "suggest" that you abandon this line of inquiry for something "safer", something more funded, like perhaps an algorithm to detect cats in photographs on the internet. You can publish on that. It will help your career. Educating undergraduates doesn't help anyone's career.

The brain evolved to communicate effectively with others. It did not evolve to manipulate symbols in a logical way. We can do it (some of us rather well) since the brain is still quite flexible. But it may account for the difference.

If the author had taken the time to make this understanding as well she would have realized people that are "good" at math get programming just as well as people that are good at Japanese/French/whatever is because they are both languages.