>>> 3) Chicago will also be the first US urban district to offer a K-8 computer science pathway, reaching one in four elementary schools in the next five years.
In my view this is as big a deal as the high school course, if not bigger. The earlier you teach it, the less rigorous and more fun it can be.
My friends who are involved in this area (teaching kids programming), some of whom work for a number of emerging organizations for teaching kids coding, realize that they need to teach (existing) teachers how to teach coding.
Ideally, programming is not taught in isolation but integrated into the other classes. For example, as the student's abilities increase, they can start coding solutions to science homework or the like.
Many organizations are hitting the point where they find they cannot rely on the handful of talented teachers to drive their curriculum agenda forward - especially as they scale to multiple cities. To address this, they need to develop their own teacher training curriculums. Since existing math/science teachers already are state certified for their subjects (and most certification laws allow some leeway for math/science to teach CS - as they should), they are the most likely candidates to promote into adding CS into their curriculum. For a software developer to become a teacher (outside of a private school or charter school context), they will find it difficult - due to the minimum certification requirements - they may even need to go back to school and study stuff that may not have a direct bearing on teaching CS (e.g. determining if children are being physically or mentally abused at home).
This is a gaping issue. I don't think the answer lies in turning teachers into the kind of programmers that I imagine many of us are on HN. Most K-8 teachers don't have the background that I had when I learned programming, or the spare time to spend hours a day hacking.
Considerable effort has been directed towards bringing programming to kids (e.g., Scratch). Perhaps we now need to make the same effort to bring programming to teachers, the majority of whom are weak in math.
A predicament for teachers is not knowing what "language" will be chosen for teaching kids. If you know nothing about programming, the sheer proliferation of options is going to be a forbidding barrier. At this stage, nobody wants to drive a stake in the ground by declaring a chosen language, but doing so would probably go further than anything else to help teachers get started.
Example: When I learned programming, that choice was driven by being wired into every affordable computer: BASIC. It wasn't the greatest language, but it gave teachers something to hang their hats on.
Editorial: If the moguls really wanted to encourage programming, they wouldn't make computers hard to program. It's an outrage that the most popular computer among teachers and kids -- the iPad -- can't be programmed.
In my view this is as big a deal as the high school course, if not bigger. The earlier you teach it, the less rigorous and more fun it can be.