A Debt Unpaid: How District and School Leaders Shape Equity in Computer Science Education

The process of translating CS educational policy between the state, central office, and schools has the potential to address racial, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities in K-12 CS education. However, the impact of CS education reform depends on how central office and school leaders define equity when creating CS education pathways for all students. Employing the Capacity for, Access to, Participation in, and Experiences in CS framework (CAPE) and Ladson-Billings’ (2006) educational debt theory, this research unpacks how central office leaders (i.e., Superintendents, Chief Academic Officers, Career and Technical Education [CTE] Supervisors) and public high school principals from six school districts across two U.S. states (anonymized to be State-1 and State-2) expand CS education in their local contexts. Four analytic strategies were used to analyze 30 semi-structured interviews, 13 of which are with leaders from State-1 and the other 17 from State-2: 1) inductive coding of individual interviews, 2) deductive coding of themes across the four components of Ladson-Billings’ educational debt theory (historical, economic, sociopolitical, moral debts), 3) school district case profile development, and 4) across-analysis of the case profiles. Analyses revealed that the leaders placed the responsibility of CS course expansion on student enrollment in CS courses and teacher performance. Consequently, they revealed an intricate relationship between the levels of the CAPE framework and the four forms of the educational debt; the leaders’ perspectives of CS education in their relative contexts presented a flipped view of CAPE, with student participation/enrollment and experiences in CS courses driving capacity and access. Implications of these findings, namely how researchers consider the CAPE framework from a stakeholder lens, are discussed.