Over the past decade, the city has made slow but steady progress expanding pathways into tech careers for underrepresented New Yorkers. Much of that effort has focused on short-term training programs for adults, like coding boot camps, and on expanding the number of K-12 schools that offer computer science classes.

But those approaches are being rapidly upended by the rise of generative AI, argue editorial and policy director, Eli Dvorkin and Robin Hood's Loris Toribio in this NY Daily News op-ed. This new era demands a shift in how New York educates — from teaching coding skills to some, to building foundational computing skills for all, integrated across every grade and subject in the K-12 system.

But most students still don’t take a computing class before graduating. In part, that’s because computer science has been viewed as a supplement to the required basic education, not an essential part of one.

To change this, the next mayor can build on the city's landmark Computer Science for All iniative by championing a CS4All 2.0 and integrating computational fluency across the city’s K-12 system. Policymakers should also meet this moment by scaling CUNY's Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) initiative, which is helping prepare future teachers bring computational thinking into classrooms citywide.

Read all the recommendations and full op-ed here.