Insights from NYC’s CS4All Initiative

By Kathryn Hill, Michelle Flores, Rishika Jain, and Edgar Rivera-Cash

(April 2025)

Launched in 2015, New York City Public Schools’ Computer Science for All (CS4All) initiative aimed to expand access to computer science to all students throughout the district, especially those who are underrepresented in CS education and careers. CS4All’s goal was to provide at least one meaningful CS experience—that is, an experience that develops computational thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking skills, and that involves career-connected learning—to every student at least once within each grade band (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12).

This report examines CS4All’s efforts to build schools’ capacity to expand CS participation. As detailed in our report on individual teacher capacity building, the initiative was initially focused on dramatically increasing professional learning (PL) opportunities for teachers. As CS4All matured, the district’s Computer Science Education team began to develop a “whole school approach” to professional learning, which was intended to foster a strong CS culture emphasizing equitable CS access and culturally responsive instruction throughout entire school communities, while also scaling up CS offerings. This report explores schools’ varying participation trajectories and identifies a number of factors that either impeded or facilitated their capacity to provide CS. Among our key findings:

• Elementary schools were more likely than middle and high schools to reach the initiative’s goal of every student taking CS.
• Competing instructional priorities were a major barrier to CS implementation.
• Building a strong school-wide culture around CS equity is foundational for expanding access.
• Common planning time is crucial to support successful integration of CS into other classes.
• Schools that required all students to take CS were able to sustain high rates of participation. 

The report outlines a number of recommendations for policy and practice, highlighting the importance of:

• Continuing to emphasize CS culture building in school communities;
• Helping schools strategize to overcome scheduling and staffing challenges and align CS with other instructional priorities;
• Nurturing connections between CS instruction and state standards; and
• Targeting PL opportunities for schools lagging the most behind in participation.