The University of Washington (UW) and Google have announced a $400,000 gift from the tech giant that will go towards efforts to diversify the field of K-12 computer science education.
Computer science is one of America’s most critical fields. It's also among the fastest growing. But it is dominated by white and Asian males. This effects both the culture of the tech world and the products that it creates—from facial recognition software that can’t recognize Black and brown people to algorithms that lead users down racist rabbit holes. 
Dr. Amy J. Ko
The lack of diversity is mirrored in the computer science teaching force. According to a 2021 report by the Computer Science Teachers Association and the Kapor Center, a non-profit focusing on the intersection of racial justice and technology, only 19% of PreK-12 computer science teachers are Black, indigenous, Latinx, or Pacific Islanders. This absence of diversity makes it harder to recruit students from under-represented backgrounds into the field, creating a vicious cycle of non-representation.
Google’s gift will bolster UW’s efforts to tackle the issue with the STEP CS program. In the program, whose acronym stands for Secondary Teacher Education Program, Computer Science, master's candidates at UW’s College of Education learning to teach other subjects like English and social studies spend an extra quarter earning a certificate in middle or high school computer science pedagogy. The money will allow UW to subsidize the $6,000 tuition of all of the students in the program, as well as to offer a $2,000 cost-of-living stipend to students from backgrounds that are under-represented in computer science.
This financial help is critical to the program’s ability to attract a diverse array of teaching students. According to Dr. Amy J. Ko, professor at UW’s Information School and co-founder of the STEP CS program, most teaching graduates need to find jobs in the spring and summer before their teaching jobs start and can’t afford to pay for an extra quarter of education.
“If that funding wasn’t there, there just wouldn’t be enough money to support the diversity of socioeconomic status that’s necessary for diversifying the teacher workforce,” said Ko.
