With its recent purchase of educational startup LearnSprout and its “Hour of Code” programming classes at Apple Stores, Apple has demonstrated that it’s pretty darn serious about education.
Proving this once again, CEO Tim Cook this week put his name to a petition asking the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to provide $250 million in federal funding to school districts so as to allow every K-12 student in the United States to learn how to code.
“America should be a leader in computer science education, yet today most schools don’t even offer this foundational subject,” the petition reads. “Please join the CEOs, governors, and education leaders below and ask Congress to support computer science in every K-12 school – for our children, and for their future.”
Alongside Cook, the petition is also signed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Bill and Melinda Gates, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Amazon’s Jef Bezos, California governor Jerry Brown, and many more — spanning both Republican and Democrat party lines.
It’s not just open to business and political elites, either. If this is a cause you believe in (and, frankly, why wouldn’t it be?) you can add your name to the petition list by clicking here. At time of writing it had gained 17,440 supporters with a target number of 25,000.
Earlier this year, President Obama called for upwards of $4 billion in funding for states, and $100 million for districts, to bring a computer science curriculum to all K-12 students (publicly-supported school grades prior to college). Hopefully, this new petition will only seek to strengthen and build on that goal.
Source: Change.org
Via: TechCrunch
