Tech firms write to Congress to encourage coding in classrooms
A coalition including the heads of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Yelp!, Oracle, Airbnb and IBM (among others) have teamed up with 27 US state governors to write to Congress asking for $250m in funding to expand the teaching of coding and computer science in schools. In the letter, signatories pointed out the hundreds of millions of dollars donated by the private sector towards teaching students to code. Furthermore, the letter is accompanied by a change.org petition spearheaded by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, which encourages others to support offering computer science in public schools.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the company's Menlo Park headquarters in 2011. Justin Sullivan/Getty

Everybody who's anybody in tech has signed an open letter asking Congress to provide $250 million in federal funding to school districts to help teach kids how to code.

Signatures of the letter include 27 governors (both Democrats and Republicans), 12 educators and a giant list of tech execs like Airbnb's Brian Chesky, IBM's Ginni Rometty, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Yelp's Jerry Stoppelman, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Salesforce's Marc Benioff, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Apple's Tim Cook, and others.

The letter points out that private industry has already donated tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of millions in tech to teach kids to code, including $48 million in donated funds announced on Tuesday.

This new donation includes $23 million from Microsoft, Google, Infosys Foundation, AT&T, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Jeff Bezos, Omidyar Network to Code.org, an organization that helps train teachers to teach computer programming.

Plus Google donated another $10 million for 2017, Microsoft chipped in an additional $10 million worth of various types of support, and Infosys is kicking in another $5 million for grants.

Mark Zuckerberg is also urging everyone to add their names to the letter through a Change.org petition.