Chicago's mayor wants every American high school grad to know how to code
Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff for the Obama administration and current mayor of Chicago, has called on the president to institute computer coding competency as a national requirement to graduate high school. "Just make it a requirement," Emanuel said during a recent Washington Post-sponsored policy event. "I am fine with Common Core. We adopted it in the city, one of the first cities to do it. I'm great. [But] you need this skill — national policy. Make it a high-school graduation requirement."
"They need to know this stuff," he continued. "In the way that I can get by kind of being OK by it, they can't." To that end, the mayor has sought to make coding proficiency a graduation requirement for Chicago-area students by 2018. Under his proposal, programming classes would count for either math, science, or foreign language credit (and certainly be more useful than a year of AP Latin). Emanuel, however, did not elaborate on whether the proposed national requirement would mirror Chicago's program, nor did he reveal how often his mayoral duties require programming prowess.
[Image Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images]
