[eli_gottlieb]

>If you correct for the income & wealth levels of the international district and match them to american districts with similar levels, you have similar academic results. There's no gap.

Most well-off American school districts do not teach even their honors students integral calculus and linear algebra by the end of high school. Valedictorians in those districts haven't usually learned that much.

Most of those kids in Palo Alto with anxiety problems over academic competition will not learn that much math in high school. It's just not done in formal school curricula. Some people might get it through taking college courses early or joining "math clubs", but no large mass of students will get it through their curriculum -- let alone the full population capable of it.

Money is being left on the table here because Americans think that real rigor comes from suffering, and anyone inadequate for the extreme suffering and boredom of secondary-school level "slow" learning is obviously inadequate to go ahead and do real work.

[kurthr]

Weird... I went to regular HS in Texas (there weren't magnet schools yet) in the 80s and they taught integral calculus, analytic geometry, and linear algebra for everyone. Standard algebra was taught in 8th grade. Several of us finished all of the math by junior year and took college classes.

I guess public school just went down hill from there? Certainly, private schools teach those classes now.

[eli_gottlieb]

I went to school in New York, and my wife did in Massachusetts, both in the 2003-2008 sorta range. I'm not sure if any linear algebra was taught (it was new to her when she took it in college, and much of it that you don't see in games-programming books was new to me too). The highest math classes in the school were AP Calculus A and AP Calculus AB, corresponding to Calculus 1 and Calculus 1+2; they were meant to be taken as seniors if you were one year fast and as juniors if two years fast. Analytic geometry as in coordinate systems and such definitely got taught.

I can't name a curriculum I know for the 2000s or 2010s where the first three semesters (Calc 1, Calc 2, Lin Alg) of university-level math got fit into high school for anyone, let alone for everyone, let alone making it the first four semesters by including multivariable calculus.