Dr. Jane Margolis interviewed by Computerworld about diversity in Technology
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 12:27AM 
UCLA Senior researcher and Black Digerati supporter Dr. Jane Margolis was recently interviewed by Computerworld's Joyce Carpenter about the results of her research into computer science education and diversity in the computing field. Below is an excerpt of the interview courtesy of Computerworld.com:
CW: Your most recent book, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, is based on research at three schools in Los Angeles. How did demographics affect access to quality computer science education at the high school level?
JM: One school was a predominately Latino School, overcrowded. Most of the students were on free and reduced [cost] lunch. Another school was predominatately African-American, a middle-and working-class school. The third was in a white, very wealthy section of Los Angeles. It had one-third students from the neighborhood and two-thirds students of color who traveled from around the city. All three were "digital high schools", which was a state initiative to get technology into the schools and get the schools wired up to the Internet in the late '90s.
The school with the high concentration of students of color had the most rudimentary of computer science instruction -- word processing, cut-and-paste assignments. AP Computer Science, as a regular course, was only at the school with the higher number of white students. [The course] had very few students of color in it. It was mostly white male students.
CW: "Stuck in the shallow end" - can you explain that pool metaphor?
JM: I read an article that talked about African-American kids drowning three times more than while children. I learned that 60% of African-American kids do not know who to swim. It turns out that there's a legacy of denied access to swimming opportunities that goes way back to Jim Crow, when access to swimming pools, beaches [and] lakefront was very contested. As in every case of segregation, there are belief systems that arise to justify the segregation. There were these absurd notions that blacks were not swimming because they were less buoyant. Those notions masked the history of denied access.
The more I learned about swimming and the denied access to swimming, and the results of people not knowing how to swim, I saw this metaphor for what was happening in compter science.
Click here to read the rest of the interview.
