New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

Specialized high schools are moderately common in the United States, some organized as general public schools, and some organized as "charter" schools (a form of regulation in the United States with public funding, but less public funding than most schools, and some variation in regulations that apply to general public schools). In my part of the United States, Minnesota, there is public school open enrollment (any student can enroll in any public school district, anywhere in the state) and quite a few charter schools (Minnesota was the first state to have any charter schools). My public school district receives students from forty-one public school districts, the farthest one more than 100 miles away. (I've heard that the child stays with relatives during the school week and goes back to his parents' home on weekends. That is perfectly legal here in Minnesota.) There is another charter school, far across the metropolitan area from where I live, that purports to be a Math and Science Academy.

http://www.mnmsa.org/

But as I think any European or east Asian reader of the school's website will soon recognize, the Math and Science Academy charter school in Minnesota does not have a credible academic program in mathematics or science up to international standards. (One of my good friends had a child in that school, and she is bitterly disappointed by how much the school killed her daughter's interest in mathematics and science with its underchallenging curriculum.) A regular public school in Minnesota is permitted to have an internal program that is academically selective, for example a "school within a school" for gifted students, as my local school district does

http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/ACADEMICS/NAVIGATORPROGRAM/P...

and as other Minnesota public school districts had first.

http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/atheneum.html

http://www.springlakeparkschools.org/schools/la/la_lighthous...

http://department.services.bloomington.k12.mn.us/modules/cms...

By contrast, charter schools in Minnesota cannot be academically selective in any way, but must accept all applicants (which is also the plan for the New York City school in the submitted article), allocating spaces by lottery if the number of applicants exceeds the number of spaces. That is one of several ways in which regulations on charter schools are more restrictive than the regulations on regular public school districts.

Minnesota has a specialized program for mathematics only

http://www.mathcep.umn.edu/umtymp/

that draws in students from all over the Twin Cities metropolitan area for classes at the University of Minnesota. I like that program a lot. My oldest son is an alumnus, and I will have two other children take that program's qualifying test in a few months, for two different entry points into that program.

In general, the cultural attitude in the United States is highly hostile to advanced programs for bright learners, as you can see in some of the comments here. Many programs for "gifted" students may not even have added value for academic growth,

http://educationnext.org/poor-results-for-high-achievers/

academic achievement even in wealthy school districts is often below the standards achieved in poorer countries,

http://globalreportcard.org/

and the United States especially lags behind in teaching mathematics to its most advanced students.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe...

So I'm glad to see the New York City experiment in offering a software engineering high school, and will be curious to see if that example is imitated in other parts of the United States.

This will very likely be a +1 over the status quo for 400 to 500 kids, at least over a 4 to 10 year period. But I expect that success will have more to do with the quality of the leadership than the soundness of the model -- which means this won't scale past the supply of Zamanskys and Spolskys.

And I'm afraid the characterization of the various symptoms skates around the deeper and touchier problems. (Some kids, in _school_ are struggling b/c their English isn't there yet, so let's focus them on subjects they can excel at anyway? Umm . . . ) That is understandable, it's a constructive effort, no point in picking fights and many people seem to believe those problems are beyond the reach of policy in any case. It seems Joel doesn't even agree with me about all of those. But the larger system ain't going anywhere until we tackle those issues. The larger problem is that we can't even discuss any of that without the whole thing turning into a food fight.

I admire the generosity here, I sympathize with the urgency to do _something_. But I really worry that efforts like this will divert a lot of valuable concern into sideroads without much potential for the larger system.

I bet many HN'ers are remembering what they were like at that age. Sure, plenty of geeks started programming in kindergarden or what have you- but I know I didn't pick engineering until I was twenty, and when I was fourteen I still had no idea what I wanted to do. (Besides knowing that I liked woodshop) If I had been forced to decide back then, I probably wouldn't have discovered engineering before it was too late.

I would actually accept a much lower wage than in industry (as long as I could live off it - which I doubt would be very low in NYC haha) to teach at such a school