Bill Introduced To Replace West Virginia's New CS Course Graduation Requirement With Computer Literacy Proficiency
4 49theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI education alongside traditional CS, teaming up with tech CEOs and leaders last year to launch a national campaign to mandate CS and AI courses as graduation requirements.
"It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS.
The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy, abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations.
4 comments
Re:West Virginia (Score: 5, Insightful)
by FictionPimp ( 712802 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @10:19AM (#65986624)
As a child you have no idea what you want to do with your life. The goal of high school should be both to educate in critical areas (reading, math, social studies, financial literacy, health, etc) but also to expose students to the broadest amount of trades possible. I think students should spend time writing code as much as they should spend time disecting an animal, mixing a chemical, or welding. Only through doing can we learn what our passion is.
If a student never experiences something how can they decide to do it as a career?
I'm fine with this (Score: 5, Insightful)
by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @09:58AM (#65986570)
Not everybody needs to know how to program, and those people who were being forced into taking a CS class were likely never going to be all that good at it.
If anything, they were likely creating the next generation of managers who think that they understand IT because they took one college course in it. They know just enough to have dangerous assumptions, but not enough knowledge to be genuinely useful.
Squishy (Score: 5, Insightful)
by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @10:17AM (#65986612)
It's a bit hard to judge this change, to the degree it is one; because both 'CS' and 'computer literacy' are both extremely vulnerable to being squished into almost anything people want them to be. Sure, in an ideal world, 'CS' is a branch of mathematics focused on complexity, computability, information, some formal logic, potentially the number theory required for hashing and cryptography; but it routinely gets slapped on everything from super hardcore academic mathematics to 'bootcamp' language-fad-of-the-week, to 'how do I excel even? 101'; and when it's a graduation requirement you need to get everyone past it's probably being softballed a bit.
'Computer literacy' is a fuzzier term to start out with; and can range from terrifyingly basic "how do I press button on android 16?" quasi-vocational stuff; to various product-focused but less trivial things (autocad or arcGIS say) to things that have much less to do with computers specifically and would historically have been taught as some sort of 'media literacy', quite possibly by the school librarian(not that most people really need to know dewey decimal in any detail; but library science programs are often excellent groundings in knowing how to sensibly deal with data sources to obtain actual knowledge).
Whether this change is good or bad seems like it hinges more or less entirely on what they meant by 'CS' previously and what they will mean by 'computer literacy' now. If the old plan was to genuinely attempt to turn high schoolers into apprentice line of business java slingers that is probably worth abandoning; but if they abandon "we'll be thinking about how to decompose a desired outcome into a series of steps, using python as an example" with "how to chat with chatbots" they will be doing the students a considerable disservice.
They can't even read... (Score: 5, Insightful)
by steak ( 145650 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @10:19AM (#65986620)
How are they going to understand a programming language?