OAKLAND — On the last day of Black History Month, The Atlantic published an article entitled Will the Push for Coding Lead to "Technical Ghettos"?

The article uses an inflammatory and racially charged phrase, “technical ghettos,” to voice concern from some quarters that programs such as Kimberly Bryant's Black Girls Code are not teaching young people of color the kind of computational thinking needed to achieve success in the tech workforce. The contention: That these programs are myopically focused on teaching kids to code.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I am one of those educators who provides opportunities for our kids through Qeyno Labs, an inclusive innovation company that three years ago launched Hackathon Academy as a "pop-up school."

We do much more than teach kids to code, and that is what makes our programs widely popular among low-opportunity youth and their communities. In our coding programs, we teach young people to be hackers, and the first thing we teach them to hack is their own isolation, because poverty is not desperation or deprivation, poverty is isolation.

Young people taking part in a Black Girls Code workshop, a Qeyno hackathon or in a boot camp at The Hidden Genius Project build apps that address the challenges in their communities such as sex trafficking, police brutality and teen depression. We provide culturally-relevant wrap-around education and workforce development that empowers and prepares our kids to succeed not just as engineers in the tech workforce, but as entrepreneurs and artists. And the experts cited in this article would know this had they ever visited our classrooms, hackathons or boot camps.

To suggest that this work to level the playing field in computer science is creating “technical ghettos” is to cast a negative light on enterprising young people of color and on those of us who are lifting systemic barriers to their paths forward as innovators.

Why do we do this work? Because computer science education in our country has failed our kids. I am not waiting for Superman to teach our kids what their peers in Silicon Valley learn in their private, elite schools.

Mainstream education is afraid  that our young people won’t learn computational thinking or critical thinking unless that happens in their schools, during their hours, and under their pedagogical control. They are afraid of a mass exodus (as seen in the rise  of homeschooling among families of color) away from an education industry too big to fail, but that fails our children, their families, and their communities in big ways.

The bottom line is this, if mainstream education was doing its job, we would not have ours.

Kalimah Priforce is Headmaster CEO of Qeyno Labs, an inclusive innovation company. He is a White house Champion of Change and an Echoing Green Fellow based in Oakland.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1oPKib4