Computer Science and Mathematics Education

By Matt Larson, NCTM President
July 14, 2016

Without a doubt, the addition of computer science to the school curriculum can expand students’ future opportunities. But it also has some important immediate implications for education today. In today’s K–12 education environment, expanding instruction in computer science involves trade-offs. With stretched budgets and increased curricular requirements, more time for computer science education necessarily means less time for something else, such as financial literacy, language arts, social studies, art, or music. 

To help make more time in a crowded curricular landscape, advocates for computer science education have been encouraging states to allow high school computer science courses to substitute for required mathematics and science courses. Many states now allow a computer science course to take the place of a mathematics or science graduation requirement. Code.org, a national organization advocating for more computer science education, reports that such substitutions are permitted in 29 states plus the District of Columbia, up from only 12 states in 2013. Many school districts are now making policy decisions related to this issue. 

While fully supporting the growth of computer science education, NCTM urges a cautious approach to substituting computer science for mathematics courses, noting that some of the emerging policies may affect mathematics education within schools, systems, and in classrooms. Some of these are described in NCTM’s recent position statement on Computer Science and Mathematics Education.

Several factors need to be considered in decisions on whether to allow computer science courses to substitute for mathematics courses. These factors include the content of the computer science course in question. The decision on a course in web design or keyboarding, for example, may be different from the decision on an Advanced Placement computer science course. Districts should also consider their current mathematics requirements. The decision in a district or state that requires four years of mathematics may be different from the decision in one that requires only two years.

Most important, NCTM’s position is that it is unacceptable to replace a course that fulfills a core mathematics requirement with another course that takes a student off the path of college and career readiness in mathematics upon high school graduation. Typically, readiness can be defined as the ability to successfully complete a college or vocational program without the need to take remedial (non-credit-bearing) courses. Operationally, in most states, mathematical readiness minimally necessitates successful completion of a three-course mathematics requirement that leads through an updated version of Algebra 2 or Integrated Mathematics 3.

Without question, NCTM supports the growth of computer science education. At the same time, however, NCTM emphasizes that mathematics is an indispensable foundation to computer science. There is no substitute for the reasoning, sense making, and computational thinking that are learned in mathematics and later applied in computer science. If a student takes a computer science course in lieu of a required mathematics course, it is important to consider what mathematics that student will be missing. Even highly regarded high school computer science courses teach very little new mathematics. They may fill in gaps by covering, for example, function composition, recursion, iteration, sets, or some other discrete mathematics, together with many Algebra 1 topics, a few geometry topics, and statistics topics recommended in the Common Core State Standards. But students have encountered most of the mathematical content in these courses in middle school. 

Thus, from a mathematics education perspective, the fundamental question of whether computer science should count toward a mathematics graduation requirement is how such a policy would impact students’ college and career readiness in relation to mathematics. Decisions that weaken students’ mathematics preparation run the risk of weakening their ability later on to enter and succeed in computer science fields—and many other fields as well, not to mention students’ preparation to be active members of our democratic society.

As an organization and community of mathematics educators, NCTM embraces and supports the growth of computer science education. However, we urge states and districts to exercise a great deal of caution in deciding whether to permit computer science courses to supplant mathematics courses. Unless carefully considered, such decisions can have the unintended consequence of weakening students’ opportunities for further study in computer science, as well as in other STEM fields, and of lessening students’ acquisition of the analytical tools that they need to become active members of our democratic society, which every day examines more issues through the lens of mathematics.

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank NCTM’s Emerging Issues Committee for its thoughtful work on a framing paper that was the basis for this President’s Message on computer science and mathematics education.

Briefly on another subject: On June 20, 2016, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report entitled Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All. The report is based on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from 2012. As is sometimes the case, the headlines in the media are subject to misinterpretation. Read more in my blog from June 29, Read Beyond the Headlines.