Christo Sims on How Idealistic High-Tech Schools Often Fail to Help Poor Kids Get Ahead
Alum Christo Sims published his essay "How Idealistic High-Tech Schools Often Fail to Help Poor Kids Get Ahead" in Zócalo Public Square. In the essay, he discusses how the benefits of computers and special instruction are eclipsed by economic disadvantage.
From the essay:
Take, for example, the recent flurry of calls to treat computer science as a requisite literacy for the 21st century. While advocates of “computer science for all” regularly tell stories about how computer science training will benefit current and future workers, few acknowledge that the most reliable projections, like those from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’, undermine their case by foretelling a division of labor and a corresponding structure of income inequality unsettlingly similar to today’s.
Read the whole essay here!
Christo wrote Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism (Princeton 2017), which explores the processes by which idealism for the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies is repeatedly regenerated even as actual interventions routinely fall short of hoped-for outcomes. The book is the winner of the 2018 Best Book Award from the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the American Sociological Association.
Christo is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and an affiliated faculty member in the Science Studies Program and the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. He works at the intersection of science and technology studies, sociology, anthropology, and design studies. Most broadly, his scholarship focuses on technological change, cultural production, and social practice.