But while more schools are offering computer science than ever before, the majority of city students — in particular, Black and Hispanic students, low-income students and girls — still aren’t taking computer science courses. Just 17% of schools meet the program’s student participation and equity goals.

To ensure that thousands more New York City students can get on the path to well-paying technology-powered careers, this will have to change.

suggests that this will be possible only by training more future teachers, at all grade levels and in every subject, to integrate into their classrooms the core concepts of computing education: the ability to ask questions, organize data and solve problems with computers.

Although when the concepts are woven throughout the curriculum, and when multiple teachers in a school have the training to implement those concepts and support computer learning, most schools still have just one or two teachers with computer education training.

A new program at the City University of New York is ready-made to address that need. The Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) program, launched with funding from the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund, Google, Gotham Gives and NYC Public Schools, trains future teachers to use computing concepts in a broad range of subjects, from social studies to science, and at every grade level. 

CITE works by engaging CUNY faculty to build computing and digital literacy into required education courses and student teaching practice. More than just a one-off workshop or seminar, the initiative is a year-round effort to help CUNY’s education faculty develop the skills needed to train future teachers in equitable, culturally relevant computing pedagogy. Crucially, CITE also supports groundbreaking faculty research on topics ranging from integrating computing concepts into early-childhood education to building digital literacy curricula for special education teachers.

Training new teachers at CUNY has the greatest potential to meet the shortfall. NYC’s public schools have made progress in providing professional development in computing education to more than 4,000 classroom teachers since 2015. But in a system with more than 75,000 educators and significant turnover, that’s just a drop in the bucket. 

Nearly one-third of the new teachers hired by the district each year graduate from CUNY. At the same time, experts estimate that fewer than 5% of CUNY’s teacher education graduates are equipped to teach computational thinking and digital literacy. In part, that’s because CITE is still relatively small. Fewer than half of CUNY’s education faculty have participated in the program to date, and its practices are only just beginning to become embedded in CUNY’s teacher education programs. As a result, most aspiring educators-in-training at CUNY do not yet receive instruction and coaching in equitable computing education practices.

This is a missed opportunity. By expanding the CITE program to reach every aspiring teacher enrolled at CUNY, the district can add more than 8,000 new educators with computing education knowledge and credentials in just five years. 

That’s why Mayor Eric Adams should work with the City Council to fully fund the CITE program so it reaches more of CUNY’s education faculty and all future teachers enrolled at CUNY’s education schools. Sustained support would help the CITE team research, test and expand training, coaching and leadership development programs in equitable computing education for both aspiring and current educators and school leaders, further extending CITE’s impact on the public schools.

The city should also establish a Computing Education Fellowship to encourage more aspiring teachers — particularly from low-income communities — to gain fluency in computing education regardless of their area of specialization and bring the benefits back to their communities. To be effective, the fellowship should include an expanded teacher residency program focused on ensuring placements in New York City public schools for CUNY student teachers trained in computer education, and it should offer scholarships for aspiring teachers from low-income backgrounds to help make a degree with a computing education focus more affordable.

The long-term benefits of building a computationally fluent workforce are clear. Since 2010, New York City’s tech sector has added 114,000 middle- and high-wage jobs, growing by 142% — more than seven times faster than the city’s economy overall.

But the fruits of this expansion have not been distributed equitably. Tech industry jobs are held disproportionately by white, male New Yorkers. Though Black and Hispanic employees make up 43% of the city’s overall workforce, they account for only 21% of the tech sector, women comprise just 24%. 

Building a more equitable economy, one in which people of color and women are fully represented in the city’s high-paid technology workforce, means encouraging far more young people to learn the fundamentals of computer science. The best way to do that is to invest now in training New York City’s future teachers to become champions of equitable computing education.

It was 2004. A Honduran immigrant who’d arrived with her family in the late 1990s, she secured a slot at a local community college, but reality hit when a counselor revealed her first semester’s tuition: $700, up front.

“I didn’t have that kind of money,” Alvarado said. And her high school offered scant advice on how to pay for it. “So I started working,” first as a daycare assistant, then in a series of manufacturing jobs, all while raising two kids on her own.

Now 37, Alvarado works for , the manufacturer of those ubiquitous plastic Hefty cups.

But this fall, 19 years after she graduated from high school, she’s about to get a second chance at college, compliments of an unusual benefactor: her oldest daughter.

Alvarado’s first-born, Yolany Baltazar, is among the first beneficiaries of , an unusual experiment in college access. Like many “college promise” programs, it essentially offers a free ride to a bachelor’s degree, covering tuition and fees for students who graduate from high school and persist through college.

But in Baltazar’s case, there’s a difference: Once she made it through her first semester, Hope Chicago made the same life-changing offer to her mother.

It’s part of a “two-generation” approach to attacking poverty, said Janice Jackson, Hope Chicago’s CEO. She noted that many college access organizations that support low-income families often “tinker around the edges, instead of going to where we know we need to go: making sure that there is much more of a pathway to the middle class.”

Advocates say research shows that greater access for both groups increases parents’ earnings and encourages kids to stay enrolled long enough to graduate.

‘A different conversation’

If Jackson’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she spent four years, from 2017 to 2021, as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, the fourth-largest district in the U.S.

“The thing about Hope Chicago is [that] when you first hear about it, it almost seems too good to be true,” Jackson said. “And I think that’s the response that a lot of people have.”

Once they sit with the idea a while, she said, many begin to ask why it isn’t true everywhere. “Why don’t we have a system in place so that kids across this country, quite frankly, can continue their education, and that finances are not the biggest barrier to them?”

At the moment, Hope Chicago has agreements with just five city high schools, offering graduates and their parents free access to 28 colleges, most of them Illinois public four-year and community colleges, along with a handful of private institutions.

Students must gain admission based on their own academic achievements — Hope Chicago doesn’t ask colleges to change their admissions criteria. And the program has no GPA cutoff, so students remain eligible to continue as long as they’re enrolled in classes.

But those who drop out also make their parents ineligible — a bit of subtle, intra-family peer pressure to stay in the game.

“Students obviously can go if their parents don’t go, but parents cannot take advantage of this unless their child is enrolled in school full-time,” Jackson said. “So they have an incentive, right? If I’m a parent and I’m in school and things are working out, but my child wants to drop out, that’s a different conversation.”

She said Hope Chicago deliberately chose its five high schools for the greatest possible impact, working in buildings that had seen “decades of chronic disinvestment,” lower achievement levels and graduation rates.

The focus, she said, is on helping the entire school. “It’s really about making a big difference.”

Baltazar, 20, still remembers the day she learned about the program in February 2022, at an assembly at Benito Juarez Community Academy on Chicago’s west side.

She texted her mother to warn her to stay off social media until she could deliver the news herself, Baltazar said. “When she picked me up from school, she was like, ‘What have you got to tell me?’ I’m like, ‘Mom, we get to go to college debt-free!’”

Alvarado was dumbstruck. “I was really happy if she got the opportunity to go [to college], just herself or my kids,” she said. “But for me, it was a little bit hard to process.”

In a few years, Alvarado’s younger son, 16-year-old Adrian, also a Hope Chicago scholar, will be able to attend college for free when he graduates from Benito Juarez.

‘In the center of a tornado’

The program launched in early 2022, with a from two philanthropists, Pete Kadens and Ted Koenig. Jackson wants to raise another $1 billion over the next decade to expand it and make more families eligible.

Recent research shows that these more educated parents will almost certainly earn more money — about $4,000 annually, according to , even though many are already years into their careers. 

But multi-generational college enrollment not only benefits parents. It also has a significant “spill-over effect” on their children. One reason is obvious: Parental education is a strong predictor of whether a student will attend college. 

A recent study by City University of New York economist noted that children whose parents are college graduates are three times as likely to attend college themselves. Investing in multigenerational college-goers, he said, is “economically efficient.” 

When Hope Chicago came to Ajani Cunningham’s school, Johnson College Prep, in spring 2022, it was co-founder Kadens who told an assembly of students they’d be going to college for free. Cunningham’s mother, Yolanda White, was filming the moment with her mobile phone and began crying. But then Jackson, Hope Chicago’s CEO, joined Kadens onstage and told the parents they were also eligible for free college. “And then the uproar was, like, magnified a thousand times,” Cunningham recalled.

“It was almost like … what people describe as being in the center of a tornado,” White said. “I think [Kadens] broke my brain because I could not react. I just .”

But stunned as she was, she knew immediately what she would do with her good fortune: finish her culinary education.

The 50-year-old mother of five had earned an associate’s degree at the for-profit Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago in 2014, which closed in 2017, part of a of for-profit closures. 

She studied to be a pastry chef and nutritionist and has spent the past few years running an online bakery called . She also created and teaches a handful of home economics and mentoring courses for Chicago Public Schools. 

White dreams of earning a bachelor’s degree and teaching people how to source and eat higher-quality, locally grown food, especially in so-called urban “food deserts.” She knows these issues firsthand: In the eight-year period when she and her five kids were homeless, White recalled, “I had to make $20 work” for a week’s worth of meals. “And they were never hungry.”

White plans to study at Kendall College’s Culinary Arts School in Chicago, but she’s holding off on enrolling for a year while she figures out how to cut back her hours at the district. She also needs to put the online bakery on hiatus.

“When someone presents the physical manifestation of a lifelong dream to you,” she said, “you kind of have to pay attention to that.”

Meanwhile her son will matriculate this fall at Loyola University Chicago, thanks to Hope Chicago, studying psychology while planning for law school and a career in civil rights law.

‘A different life’

The organization’s efforts unfold as the district faces an odd mixture of crisis and confidence: While Chicago Public Schools in 2022 boasted a record-high graduation rate of 83%, just one-fifth of high school students were reading and doing math at grade level, according to the . And nearly half of students missed at least 18 days of school.

Hope Chicago says its work is already having an impact: An April report by Belfield, the City University scholar, found that college enrollment rates averaged 74% — a 17% increase — in the organization’s first year partnering with the five schools.

The program is looking to expand — at the moment it serves about 4,000 students, and is fund-raising both publicly and privately with hopes of announcing more high schools in the future.

While the two-generation approach is unique, the program operates in the tradition of “college promise” programs that for nearly 20 years have guaranteed tuition-free access to higher education. The movement began in 2005, in , and now counts more than 300 programs in at least 32 states, according to the .

The offers Kalamazoo Public Schools graduates up to 100% of tuition and fees at in-state public universities and community colleges. A found that six years after high school graduation, students in the program had higher rates of college credential attainment — 46%, up from about 36% before 2005. 

While the researchers said making college free won’t necessarily ensure that more students enroll, they found that offering a “simple, universal, and generous scholarship program” can significantly increase educational attainment, especially among low-income students.

Last spring, Baltazar finished her first year at in Normal, Ill., about a two-hour drive south of Chicago. Studying biology and pre-dentistry, she spent much of her freshman year adjusting to dorm life.

Baltazar had the advantage of bunking with a friend she’d known since middle school. She made new friends by simply leaving the dorm room door ajar and playing music.

Meanwhile, her mother is putting the finishing touches on an application to attend , an online program, in August. She plans to study finance while keeping her job at Pactiv Evergreen, and still can’t get over her good fortune — or her daughter’s. 

“I think just the idea of her going to school without any debt, and including myself, is just like …” She paused for a second. “In four or five years, this is just a different life.”