8 states had no Hispanic students take the exam: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas,
    Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.

First, Wyoming should not be on the list. They had zero students take AP CS.

For the other states, here are the total number of students that took AP CS in 2013.

    Alaska       21
    Idaho        47
    Kansas       47
    Mississippi   1
    Montana      11
    Nebraska     46
    North Dakota  2

    Alaska       6.1%
    Idaho        11.0%
    Kansas       11.0%
    Montana      3.1%
    Nebraska     9.7%

    Alaska       1.28
    Idaho        5.17
    Kansas       5.17
    Montana      0.341
    Nebraska     4.462

The real question we should be asking: Why are so few schools offering AP CS?

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html

I didn't see much in the way of analysis, just raw data and some highlights.

My high school did not have qualified teachers. We had programming classes, but they didn't even cover AP CS A.

I believe you mean "Alaska and Montana."

Are there a lot of other countries where this kind of data is compiled? I feel like I've never seen anything like it in France, but maybe I wasn't paying attention.

France's national pre-occupations are pretty different, I expect. I suspect a closer analogy would be to the relations between French settlers and indigenous Muslims in Algeria.

I appreciate the sentiment behind it and think that it makes sense, but every time I see one I can't help but be amused that such legislation is directly responsible for dozens of government departments sending out questionnaires about peoples' race [1] where they previously did not. :)

[1]: These are, of course, suitably anonymised after the fact. No worries there.

officially ignoring that fact does not level the field; it just lets the people favoured by the inequities in the current setup continue to have the luxury of ignorance, while everyone else struggles along with no help from the system.

tl;dr: calling it an "obsession with race" does the people actually trying to help by compiling this data a signal disservice

The school has a terrific athletics program with great facilities but can't come up with a CS teacher in a neighborhood where most of the parents work for software companies.

I think the more likely problem is the state requirements for public school teachers, which would come down to about two years of political re-education camp, which such programmers wouldn't put up with. The elite private schools around here pay less than the public schools (yes, less) and yet they all seem to have CS (and other subject) teachers. Their teachers tend to be quite a bit older and have subject matter degrees and/or professional experience rather than education degrees.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApVHgXTTTuMfdEF...

In this case, I think it's the entire reason to read the article.

Looking at the sheets [0] for Maryland, where I live...

2007 Black - Pass Rate: 11.40%, Enrollment: 114, Percentage of Enrollment: 14.10%

2008 Black - Pass Rate: 36.48%, Enrollment: 74, Percentage of Enrollment: 8.26%

2009 Black - Pass Rate: 21.66%, Enrollment: 120, Percentage of Enrollment: 11.56%

2010 Black - Pass Rate: 17.89%, Enrollment: 190, Percentage of Enrollment: 14.05%

Things have evened out a bit since, but I'd love to know what if anything was going on there? Changing teachers? Smaller class sizes?

0: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/uploads/556/DetailedStateIn...

Let me be clear: I think it's a great way to test students as long as the graders/instructors aren't overly anal about syntax or even API correctness. I was lucky to have teachers who were okay with unbalanced parentheses, made-up API functions, and in upper-division classes, pseudo code was even acceptable (data structures). (However most CS classes will be biased towards imperative programming over functional programming).

To use a cooking analogy, if you have to think about how you are cutting the fish, you won't be able to think about how you are going to prepare or cook the fish. Writing code on paper forced me to think about design first; that is, it enabled me to think about what I was going to do with the fish.

2008 1778

2009 1879

2010 2048

2011 1972

2012 2103

2013 2253

According to the spread sheet, this is the numbers per year of schools that offered it nationally. (5A - 12B on Sheet1)

Of course percentages are ambiguous without a population size and other factors.

EDIT: Removed unflattering remark.

Not to mention the relative sample sizes involved, or the methods by which quality is determined.

Basically, this comparison is nonsensical.

Pro tip: look at the actual data. The sample sizes are way to small to attempt to draw conclusions like these.

Also, Wyoming should not even be mentioned. I find it somewhat dishonest to talk about states that had no members of X demographic group take a test when nobody in the state took it.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/28000lk.html

Categorizing that as a bad demographic in isolation is just as ignorant as arguing that evolution has no place in a science education.

By definition it is. Religion contradicts rationalism. What you're doing is compartmentalizing. You're applying certain thought processes and methods of reasoning to everything besides your religion.

Regardless, this is not an attack on your belief and I never intended to come off as hostile. What I had in mind were the fundamentalists and fanatics who insist that lack of faith leads to decadence.

No - I have reasons for believing everything I do. They're not easily verifiable or repeatable by others, hence not scientific, but I don't just suspend belief or believe because I want to.