History

The formation of the Chiago Alliance for Equity in Computer Science (CAFÉCS) was formalized in 2017, but was rooted in activities that began in 2008.

In March of 2008, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teachers Don Yanek and Jeff Solin attended a catalyzing session at the ACM SIGCSE (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) conference in Portland, Oregon. The session was focused on discussing declining enrollments of students in computer science; Solin identified himself near the end of the session and asked if anybody could offer help in Chicago. This question was the impetus that helped connect several Chicago teachers, including Baker Franke, and before the end of the year Yanek, Solin, and Franke had joined with university computer science faculty member Dale Reed (U. of Illinois at Chicago) to establish the Chicago Chapter of the ACM Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA).

During the same year, Reed and university computer science faculty member Ronald Greenberg (Loyola U. Chicago) joined together to begin an intensive program of high school outreach activities that received National Science Foundation (NSF) funding near the end of the year, and educational researcher Steven McGee (The Learning Partnership and Northwestern U.) was enlisted as an external evaluator.

During the course of additional SIGCSE meetings and PI (principal investigator) meetings of NSF's "Broadening Participation in Computing" and "Computing Education for the 21st Century" programs, members of the Chicago group became acquainted with the effort dubbed "CS10K" seeking to add 10,000 well-trained computer science teachers in U.S. high schools and spearheaded by NSF program officer Jan Cuny. The Chicago group turned their focus for future activities in this direction and submitted proposals for NSF funding in 2009 and again in 2010 after joining with new partners: Lucia Dettori, Ljubomir Perkovic, and Terry Steinbach (all of DePaul U.), and Brenda Wilkerson, the new coordinator at CPS for the Career and Technology Education Information Technology programs.

One of the major difficulties facing the group was what computer science curriculum to promote to Chicago teachers, but by 2010, it was becoming clear that the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum held great promise, and we were proposing to adapt this curriculum in Chicago. The ECS developers, Joanna Goode and Gail Chapman, and their colleagues in Los Angeles had been interacting with members of the Chicago team at SIGCSE, NSF, and CSTA meetings, and in July 2010, Yanek, Solin, and Reed travelled to Los Angeles (funded by the 2008 NSF grant) to attend a weeklong ECS professional development (PD) session. Only at this point, did the Chicago team gain a full appreciation for the ECS program and a recognition that it is a curriculum and professional development program that need to remain tightly linked.

By 2011, the Chicago group was committed to pushing ahead with Exploring Computer Science in Chicago as best we could, regardless of grant funding outcomes; fortunately, our efforts were facilitated when we finally succeeded in our third NSF funding attempt under the program moniker "Taste of Computing" (appealing to Chicagoans familiarity with the "Taste of Chicago", the world's largest food festival and the largest festival in Chicago). In addition, Reed began bringing in funding from Google for CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) programs. ECS PD sessions were offered in Chicago starting in 2011; initially, Gail Chapman was brought in to lead the bulk of the PDs, but leadership gradually transitioned to local talent, a critical step in allowing the Chicago program to grow and be self-sustaining.

In December of 2013 at a Chicago press conference with Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emmanuel and CPS CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett, Code.org announced a partnership with CPS, establishing a five-year goal to provide a CS pathway in every CPS high school. Under Wilkerson’s leadership in Chicago this effort was called “CS for All”, a name later adopted by the Obama Whitehouse for its own initiative to expand computer science education.

In February 2016, CPS was able to capitalize on previous progress to institute a computer science requirement for high school graduation, becoming the first large school district to do so. The requirement of a year-long computer science course is effective starting with the high school class of 2020.

CAFÉCS now stands as an exemplar for efforts to bring "computer science for all" to other geographic regions and for the power of researcher-practitioner partnerships to bring about valuable changes in educational settings. The following graphics show some of our progress through 2017.