This document serves as a standard to which a code school may adhere. It is not a detailed explanation of potential implementation, but rather a specification broad enough that each school can fulfill in its own way. It reflects the authors' hope that rival schools will become allies in a singular mission to serve, teach, enrich, and support the newcomers to the craft of programming who have put themselves in our charge.
We promise that our students will always be first and foremost.
We promise to accept into our schools only those students for whom the class will be of obvious and likely benefit when measured against the cost in time, finances, and beyond.
We promise to, with kindness and grace, not accept those students for whom the cost of time and tuition outweighs the benefit of the class.
We promise to set expectations that are reasonable and fair, including workload during the course, qualifications to be gained, and job opportunities following graduation.
We promise to promote neither inflated nor deflated graduation rates, dropout rates, failure rates, job placement rates, graduate salaries, and long-term prospects.
We promise to make our instructors available to contact by the public, and to make their career experience publicly known.
We promise to provide, within the bounds of privacy requested by individual students, contact information for any student enrolled for any length of time, both past and present.
We promise to work in the open, making students' coursework and projects publicly available.
We promise to protect our students from any employer or organization that would mistreat them or take advantage of their talents.
We promise to require students and staff to sign a detailed code of conduct.
We promise to have zero tolerance for harassment of any kind, as established in the code of conduct.
We promise to create a safe environment for all students and staff. To quote Lambda Jam's Diversity Policy, this specifically means creating a safe environment for "people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, neurotype, religion, elder status, family structure, culture, subculture, political opinion, identity, and self-identification."
We promise to collaborate, whenever possible, with any school for the benefit of our students.
We promise to offer a legal agreement that protects both our students and our school.
We promise to offer fair and reasonable refund policies to students when either party cannot fulfill their agreement.
We promise to celebrate other schools who are known to follow these guidelines, and to celebrate any student attending a worthy school, even if it is not our own.
We promise to hold ourselves and each other to these standards, to accept redress when due, and to correct ourselves humbly.
If any of the individuals or organizations signed below falter in any of these points, we invite public accountability, and we promise to right our wrongs.
- Mason Stewart, Greenville, SC - Monday, March 17th, 2014
- Jo Albright, Atlanta, GA - Saturday, March 29th, 2014
This document is open sourced at https://github.com/masondesu/code-school-manifesto.
If you would like to edit the document, or add your company or signature, please submit a pull request. A pull request will be generated automatically by using GitHub's web-based editor. You can open this document directly in the editor.
Style guidelines and conventions are found in the markdown comments. The authors encourage, but don't require, signees to contribute their own signatures. This is preferred to batch-adding :)
Improvements to HTML/CSS/JS are welcome. To run the site locally, clone this repo, run npm install and then gulp watch.
Once pull requests are merged into the master branch, a repo collaborator will build and deploy shortly thereafter.
The Code School Manifesto by Mason Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
