DCPS Teacher Becomes the Student at AU

Pete Magee, CAS/MS '24, was stumped.

More than a decade into his career in the classroom, the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) science teacher was a pupil again, struggling through his first homework assignment in an online R programming course offered to undergrad and graduate students at American University.

He was asked to identify what was wrong with a line of code-something he still couldn't see after about 20 minutes. When his wife pointed out it was only missing a closed parenthesis to become a valid function, the moment of clarity launched his new skill-building mission into orbit.

"It felt like a rocket ship because after about a year and a half, I went from not appreciating a closed parenthesis to running cross-validation and writing recurrent neural networks," said Magee, who began his 15th year teaching at Columbia Heights Education Campus this fall. "I look at that as not necessarily anything that I did well or not. I look at that as a testament to the setup, the professors, and how they structure things to really put me in a position to grow."

Magee is one of 29 DCPS teachers who have taken free graduate-level data science classes at AU through the Data City Program, a partnership funded by the College of Arts and Sciences and the NASA DC Space Grant Consortium-of which AU has been the leading institution for more than 20 years. The initiative, launched in 2021, is one way the consortium backs student research, grants, and other projects at DC universities.

Magee didn't stop with the introductory class. He wanted to know more. In May 2024, after a year and a half coursework at night and on weekends, he became the first teacher from the program to earn a master's degree in data science.

CAS professor Nate Harshman, director of the NASA DC Space Grant Consortium, said Magee is a successful example of what the consortium is designed to do-grow the STEM field.

"We need more teachers like Pete who are prepared to bring data science to the next generation of students," Harshman said. "Between all the federal agencies and labs, research institutions, think tanks, and higher education, we generate an amazing amount of data in DC, and we need a growing data science workforce to turn this data into information and insight."

Magee said that graduate work has helped him be a better teacher. Now, he feels even more equipped to help his 10th through 12th grade physics and biology students make sense of their own data sets-compiled through experiments like seeing how much light can be absorbed by solutions at different concentrations.

"One of the things in education we always talk about is data analysis with an eye towards meeting students' needs-making sure your curriculum can reach as many students as possible," Magee said. "I saw a natural mesh point between some of the data analysis discussions I had as an educator and [developing] this skill set. When you are given a set of rough, largely incomplete data, you need to be creative to process it [and] extract the signal from the noise."