MIT launches an institute-wide push into K-12 and community-college STEM teaching

About 60 percent of US high schools offer computer science, yet only 6 percent of students enroll in it, according to MIT ^[15]. The two figures have different denominators. One counts schools and the other counts students, so the pair cannot be turned into an uptake rate among students who have a course available ^[14]. If the courses sit mostly in large schools, many students have access and few use it. If they sit mostly in small schools, the bigger problem is that most students never had the option ^[14].

The calculus tutoring is the one strand with a year of operation behind it ^[5]. About half of US school districts offer calculus, MIT says ^[17]. The Institute calls the project "a ready model of outreach with growth potential" ^[13]. The release does not report how many students the project has tutored, or how their results compare with similar students who were not tutored.

Both co-directors put the emphasis on in-person work. "The goal is to provide programs that are both scalable and high-touch, and make an impact across the country," said Eric Klopfer, a faculty co-director and director of MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program ^[6]. "This effort is about really rolling up sleeves and getting out there and engaging communities, and helping to build capacity across the United States," said Cynthia Breazeal, the other faculty co-director and a professor of media arts and sciences ^[7].

I think the institute-wide label is the substantive part of the announcement ^[2]. It puts STEM capacity in schools and community colleges among MIT's own stated goals. Whether elite universities in general are taking on the same mission is a separate question, and an announcement from a single campus cannot settle it. Kornbluth framed the effort as MIT's own business. "A natural extension of the Institute's long record of national service, MIT for America is grounded in our deep belief in potential over pedigree, of the transformative power of learning by doing and in the open sharing of knowledge," she wrote ^[4].

"Talent is everywhere. We think opportunity should be, too," Breazeal said ^[10]. Claudia Urrea, who heads MIT for America and the MIT pK-12 Initiative, put the target population this way: "We want to find people who have not had the opportunity to discover their talent," she said ^[11].