One Sunday morning, shortly before I was born, President Ronald Reagan stormed into the Oval Office with a copy of The Washington Post. “Can someone please explain to me how we have close to 10% unemployment, yet there are ten pages of job openings in the help wanted section? Jobs problem? There is no jobs problem.” His advisors politely informed him that the issue was that there weren’t enough people with the requisite skills for those open positions.¹ Sound familiar?

Highly-skilled, creative, problem solvers have the luxury of deciding which of their suitors they will work with. The rest find themselves struggling to find gainful employment as their jobs hop on boats to places where someone is willing to do the same job for half the compensation. We are at a crossroads. We can bellyache about how the world has passed us by as we sat still in front of our 96-inch plasmas or we can take action and decide how to tackle the tough question: How do we create top-shelf talent and keep our competitive edge?

A New Hope

Last Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new high school focused on teaching students the fundamentals of software engineering, the Academy for Software Engineering. For a skilled software engineer, an entry level salary approaching $100,000 a year is not uncommon and, according to a recent report by Jacques Mattheij, engineers in their late-twenties at Google enjoy compensation packages just shy of a quarter of a million dollars annually.

It is fair, however, to approach this new endeavor with a healthy dose of skepticism. There are a myriad of schools with ambitious names in the Department of Education and, often, the name is just that. I went to a school in New Jersey called High Tech High School. Their pride and joy? Musical theatre. I don’t think they employed single teacher who could program their way out of a paper bag.

The Academy for Software Engineering will be different. The initial idea came from Stuyvesant High School computer science teacher, Mike Zamansky, who has championed the importance of software design in the curriculum for over ten years. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures—the fine people who’ve invested in services I rely on regularly, such as Foursquare, Codecademy², Kickstarter, Tumblr, and Twitter—is providing some of the initial financial capital needed to get the school off the ground as well helping to raise funds from the technology community at-large. In addition, Evan Korth, the faculty liaison for technology entrepreneurship at New York University, will be leading and advisory board, which includes Joel Spolsky of the venerable Fog Creek Software, Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai, and Anil Dash as well as seasoned educators from around the city.

The Academy for Software Design will not skim off the top. Grades, state test scores, and attendance records do not play a role in the admissions process. Instead, students will be admitted based on their passion for programming and technology. As a result, students across the city will have a fair shot in pursuing their interests and benefitting the City of New York by contributing to its pool of highly-skilled, creative engineers. Imagine if more schools in the city revolved around their students’ entusiasm?

This school will change how the game is played.

Significance

How do we prepare middle school students fot the Academy for Software Engineering? How do we reach the small pockets of students in each and every school who have a passion for programming but no opportunities to capitalize on that interest?

The Academy for Software Engineering is exciting in its own right, but—serving just under 500 students once fully operations—it’s only the first step in a larger movement. The school already has a lot of talent and brainpower behind it and, over the next few years, I predict that it’s programs will become a much needed blueprint for schools throughout the city who want to integrate best practices and cutting-edge technology software engineering programs into their curriculum.

Anyone who reads this site regularly can correctly assume that I’m beyond excited to see such an innovative endeavor in my school district and I will be looking to help the Academy for Software Engineering in anyway possible. I strongly encourage you to do the same.