Giving Compass' Take:

• Lola Fadulu explains why Digital Pioneers Academy is focusing on building diversity and inclusion in STEM through computer science programming for their majority low-income and minority student body. 

• How can funders help spread access to high-quality STEM programming? What are the primary barriers to inclusion in STEM?

• Learn how to help address the STEM teacher shortage. 

Before opening Digital Pioneers Academy (DPA), a charter school, the school’s founder and principal, Mashea Ashton, surveyed more than 200 of the community’s families about what they were looking for in a school.

The survey responses were telling: Ninety percent of the families wanted their children to take a computer-science class. The Hillcrest families were clearly aware of the ways technology is disrupting the economy and of the importance of computer-science education.

But computer-science education is lacking across the United States. Just 40 percent of schools in the U.S. teach computer programming; computer-science–focused schools, like DPA, are hard to come by. Some policy makers, including those in the Trump administration, have called for employers to look outside of the traditional education system, recruiting from training programs, for example, for the jobs of the new economy.

To a certain extent, there is only so much that educators can do: Technology is changing quickly and often, making it difficult for teachers to keep up. But Tiffanie Williams, DPA’s director of curriculum and instruction, believes that the school can deal with those challenges by continually adapting its curriculum and teaching practices. “We want our students to not just consume the digital economy, but to also be a part of creating it,” Ashton says.

The idea is to address a shortage of computer-science education in the nation’s capital, as well as income inequality and a lack of gender and racial diversity in tech. D.C.’s Ward 7, where DPA is located, has a median household income of almost $40,000; the median household income for D.C. as a whole is more than $75,000, and on average, software developers make more than double what entire families in Ward 7 earn. Almost 30 percent of the population in Ward 7 lives below the poverty line. And fewer than 20 percent of residents in the ward have obtained a bachelor’s degree or higher. In D.C. as a whole, fewer than 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line, and almost 60 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher. DPA’s students are from Wards 7 and 8, which are, respectively, almost 95 percent African American and more than 93 percent African American, according to 2010 data. Not even 3 percent of Google’s workforce is African American.

Read the full article about Digital Pioneers Academy by Lola Fadulu at The Atlantic.