[jldugger]

When I was in HS so many years ago, at a relatively affluent suburban high school, AP CS was not offered. We had 2 single semester classes, basic and advanced programming, taught in BASIC and C-style C++.

But they weren't AP certified classes, and frankly, I doubt they have the money to recruit and retain instructors. The guidance counselors pretty much told us not to take them back to back freshman year, because then you'd be out of classes to take. Most of the students seemed to know more about programming than the teacher, who was also responsible for teaching accounting.

Class period ends up being 10 minutes to do the day's programming assignment and 50 minutes fucking around pen-testing the IT setup trying to run Duke Nukem. One time the kid who's dad worked in district IT mentioned that "when you forget your name badge when you show up for work at Disneyland, they give you one that says 'Dale'. Browsing the global contact directory one day, I came across an account, first name Dale, last name missing. A few guesses later I discovered the password was di$ney, and Dale had quite a few drives mapped it probably shouldn't, like one with the staff directory including home addresses phone numbers and employee IDs.

So obviously the real reason Russia outdoes the US is that US targets are too easy to hack ^_^

[opportune]

I think the problem is that for most people qualified enough to teach AP CS, there are a lot more attractive jobs available to them outside of teaching (of course, if they love teaching, they might not take them). I've had former math teachers from HS who quit and did coding / data science programs so that they could effectively double their salaries.