Obviously it is genetics. Girls are just inferior to boys at math.

The reason is that in the 50s there were no pre-calculus or calculus courses to take in high schools.

I think Bill gets the reading-comprehension award for the day.

I hope you have better trolls at your new place, Kevin.

I would guess that part of the reason is more and more angst about getting an early start on careers. This goes hand-in-hand with increasing pressure on kids to get head starts in their careers. This of course goes hand-in-hand with the widespread belief of:

1. Success in school
2. ???
3. Profit

I hope the overall trend, that both girls and boys continue to earn more math credits in high school continues.

But I wonder ...... when will we hit peak math?

Maybe it's been realized that calculus is easier to practice than algebra.

All the girls in my extended family have taken calculus in high school and are going into science oriented careers. I barely made it through Algebra 1 and I admit to being extremely math challenged even though I spent hours on homework. I was told that "girls just aren't as good as boys in math." How nice that this is changing.

Well, the 1950's were a long, long time ago. But many of those high school girls have their sights set on a degree in business or the sciences. To get there Calculus is required. Despite the reputation is has, Calculus isn't really all that hard once you wrestle the concepts of limits and infinity to the ground. Sure, the trig functions may send you through a few loops (thats a math joke) but for the most part you're just learning some more advanced algebra techniques.

There most certainly WAS calculus taught in high schools in the 1950s. A simple google search proved me right.

I'd guess that in the 50s, roughly 0% of high school students took pre-calculus or calculus classes. Today it's about a third. What accounts for this? Kevin Drum

Title IX.

I graduated from high school in 1965 in New Orleans. The most advanced math class available to me in Senior year was Trigonometry/Analytical Geometry.

The initial increase was due largely to the AP Program, which encouraged schools to offer Calculus courses that allowed students to earn college credit. Keep in mind that the AP Program has not been around forever.

There are two factors driving the increases in the past twenty years. One is that, now that AP Programs have become stable and entrenched, those programs have become part of school districts' overall thinking. When the classes started, they were a good place to put strong seniors. Now, school districts have figured out that by putting junior high Pre-Algebra in one year and starting students off with Algebra in 8th grade, lots of students can easily get to AP Calculus by senior year. In other words, junior high schools have changed their curricula to account for Advanced Placement exams.

The other recent driving force, which is a negative driving force, is the Newsweek High School Rankings. That magazine issue is the highest selling issue of the magazine by far each year, and it uses an extremely simplistic method to rank high schools. The method is to count the number of AP and IB tests that students take and divide by the number of students. This is a negative driving force because schools look better when they push students into AP courses whether or not the students are ready. Newsweek makes no effort to examine the scores of the students, so a school that has 200 students fail the test looks better than a school that has 50 students pass the test and 50 students fail it. In fact, a school that has 200 students fail the test looks better than a school that has 199 students pass the test. The ratings really are that stupid. Schools have responded by dumbing down their AP courses--it's still calculus, but it's less rigorous calculus.

The College Board has responded by certifying AP Teachers, but that has just added an additional layer of paperwork, and it rewards paper pushers.

Gee. Maybe something happened in the late 50's that stimulated interest in scientific and mathematical education. Wonder what it might have been? There were certainly calculus classes available in the early 60's, maybe before.

As for more recent trends, hasn't college admissions competition gotten progressively tougher over the years, and wouldn't that lead to demand for more advanced H.S. classes?

The change is cin our culture. You can now hear moms of young sons encourage them, by telling them "You can do anything girls can do." (As the father of young sons, I can testify to this.)

There is a gender gap, all right - only it is in the other direction. It's the boys that are in real trouble. In 17 of 21 major categories, ranging from prekindergarten through medical school and admission to the Bar, etc., girls now lead boys.

You should see the school data I work in, looking at kids in pre-k and kindergarten. We see no racial or ethnic gaps, but we see significant gender gaps. It may be developmental, of course, and probably is. But unlike yesteryear, the boys now don't catch up like they used to.

I teach mathematics at a medium-sized liberal arts college in the Midwest. Every year (when I am teaching calculus I in the Fall) I ask my Freshman students whether or not they have had calculus in high school and the number who respond "yes" has been gradually rising over the years. However, those same students have algebra/trig skills no better than their peers who did not take calculus and, often, their calculus course consisted of memorizing formulas and applying them to standard drill-type problems. They did not really understand where the formulas came from nor what they really meant. It seems to be an educational arms race: if the high school in the neighboring district offers calculus, then you had better offer it as well. The teachers may not be adequately trained so the results are predictable when the kids take calculus taught at the college level and with higher standards.

I wonder why kids are given the option to not take math classes for four years of high school. I remember that I was only "required" to take two years (Chicago suburban school district). What's up with that? Kids should all be taking four years.

The first AP Calculus exams were given in 1955 to 285 students nationally. Calculus BC was added in 1969. The doubling time for the number of students taking the tests has generally been about 8 years, though the AB growth, while still significant, is no longer that fast. Those of you who took BC and remember logistic growth will realize that AB is starting to approach its carrying capacity.

Remember that the 1990 birth cohort was the largest in American history until 2005 or so. Competitive college admissions are pretty tough these days, particularly so for white, non-poor, non-athletic girls. Admissions counselors urge girls, even probable English or French or history types like my daughter, to go as far as they can in math even if it's not directly relevant to their college interests. Math grades work as another proxy intelligence test along with the SAT -- if a college has lots of high-verbal girls to choose from, it's easy for them to take the ones with the higher math grades and more advanced math courses.

This has the collateral benefit, of course, that those girls will have an easier time switching to more technical majors if they are so inclined. I teach computer science, perhaps the most unpopular college major for 18-year-old girls, and we are counting on (and marketing to) a lot of those major switches.

My daughter just started high school. Everyone is now required to take 4 years of math. Some of her peers are taking Alebra II, as freshmen (having taken Algebra I and Geometry in 7th and 8th grade). This will enable them to take AP Calculus AB and AP Calculus BC before they graduate from high school.

I think it's simple. More kids go to college now than in the 50's, so they are taking more college bound classes. I have a daughter who is a senior and a son who is a junior---both have taken advanced math and both are very good at it. In order to do well on the SAT and ACT advanced math is a must. And beyond that, there are more options in high schools now than then. Yes, Calc was taught in some schools, but not any where near the number it is taught in now.

rusrus--
There are lots of people demanding more requirements, since math, science, English, social studies, languages, gym, drivers ed, sex ed, oral communication, housekeeping, business ed, fine arts, and a few other curricula all have their supporters. Keeping basic requirements low is a good thing, because it allows flexibility for the students who get focused in a particular area by their senior year and want to pursue it. It also allows flexibility for special education students with a wide variety of issues.

If you're interested in math and/or consider yourself preprofessional, then you should take four years of math in high school, and nobody is stopping you from doing so.

There is another simple difference. High School kids are older. The, to me, weird trend of teaching reading in kindergarden but requiring kids to be older (so they learn reading at the same age that kids used to learn it but the name of the grade is different) means that they are in high school at an age that I was in college. My daughter learned calculus at the same age that I did but she learned it free and I had to pay tuition.

Yes, but their Geometry courses were a lot harder.

If you look at Contest Problem math from the 50s, it's very interesting. Things that look like number theory or probability are very easy; things that look like geometry are mind-numbingly difficult.

Also, precalculus and calculus classes were a alot less interesting before the advent of powerful graphing calculators and the computer.

As a certifiable science nerd, I have always wondered how someone who doesn't understand calculus can call themselves educated (this gets quite a rise out of my humanity friends). But then again, I have heard that Jimmy Carter was the only president who understood calculus.

My daughter came home from school last week to teach me the "better" way to add numbers, it's from left to right with weird rules on how to carry and which digits should be added first.

We're doomed Kevin. Doomed I say.

(Bostonian, I learned calculus while enrolled in High School at the nearby community college, for free.) (Community College is often the best high school, in many many ways, and I recommend more high school students take courses at the community college.)

I think increased competition for well-paid careers, with accompanying pressure on kids, has a lot to do with this. I do have a question for maxgowan: He's saying boys are falling behind girls. What I've always heard is that girls tend to group around the mean, while boys have more outliers, e.g. more high and low achievers. My understanding is that's been a trend for quite some time. Is he saying that that's changed, or is he failing to look at all of the data?

It is good that the girls have caught up (and by all appearances have passed) the boys. One of the things that bugs me is that we now have a lot of volunteer groups, helping young women to pursue technical careers, but attention to helping boys pursue such careers seems to have lagged.

part of the increase is due to Asian students. If you want to keep up with the Asian students, you have to take Calculus. At many suburban high schools, the AP calculus classes have a large asain component. The Asian community has enver seem to have the problem of believing that girls are not good at math.

However, for all of the high school students taking calculus, fewer americans are studying engineering and many of those to start out in engineering quickly switch to something else.

One of the problems of calculus in high school is that you end up in Cal II (methods od integration) as an entering freshmen and probably do not do well in the class.

My father went to high school in the Bay area in the late 1930s. Public high school, he was a very good student, one of the smart kids. According to him, in four years the students were required to read one novel (A Tale of Two Cities) and one Shakespeare play (R&J I think). That was it. How many people reading this have attended high school since 1980? Didn't they make you read a lot more than that? Not everything is getting worse.

Offhand, I would say that the main reason that boys are falling behind girls is because in our current cultural mindset, education is so infradig for boys. Ignorance is de rigueur for young men, who seem to think that all they have to do is become proficient at some sort of software application that seems difficult to oldsters, and voila,they have the keys to the kingdom.

Boys are also encouraged to waste huge amounts of time on their computers. Girls haven't caught up there, but once they do, watch out, their grades and skills will go down the intertubes too.

superdestroyer: fewer americans are studying engineering

Thus demonstrating that American students aren't as naive as sometimes claimed.

"What accounts for this?"

Probably something to do with underage drinking.

'Sputnik' (I attended law school in the 1980s partly funded by a National Defense Student Loan, a program originally intended to increase math and science education) and increased workforce skills requirements cover most of the overall increase in high school students taking calculus.

As to the disproportionate increase in the number of girls taking the classes, I'd cite feminism in the 1970s and the effort to make schools (among many institutions) more girl-friendly. Feminists’ assumption seemed to be that the white male power structure designed (maybe unconsciously?) institutions to favor the next generation of white male adults.

But the K-12 system was designed under an industrial production model, not with students, boys or girls in mind, but for ease and efficiency of producing better educated (coming off the farm) adults for the workforce.

As a parent of boys, I've found a few bookshelves worth of "why the education system doesn't work for boys" critiques. In a nutshell, the thesis is "the education system wasn't designed with boys or girls in mind, but feminism resulted in some changes to make it more girl-friendly. We need to do [X] to make the system boy-friendly as well."

I have some first hand experience with high school students who have taken calculus. They can certainly differentiate/integrate functions, but almost none of them have any idea what it means- sort of like reading Hamlet but not being able to tell you afterwards what it is about.

MaryCh: "the education system wasn't designed with boys or girls in mind, but feminism resulted in some changes to make it more girl-friendly. We need to do [X] to make the system boy-friendly as well."

What's X? And for that matter, what changes have been made to make it more girl friendly? Seriously. I've heard those things said, but have never gotten much in the way of particulars (my ignorance - I'm not claiming to have done any real research).

I haven't seen any major increase in the proportion of girls relative to boys taking calculus classes at my college, but I wouldn't mind seeing a reduction in the gap. Only a quarter of my students in my last Calculus III class were female.

As for high school calculus, it didn't exist in my Central California high school in the 1960s and I remember being surprised when I found out in the 1970s that some high schools offered it. These days quite a few of my college students have had high school calculus. Unfortunately, I see no sign that they do better in my college calculus classes than the students who topped out in high school at trig or pre-calc. In most cases, high school calculus is not very robust and creates students who think they know calculus because they learned a handful of formulas.

I wish I had something meaningful to say, but it is hard to raise teenagers these days. Many of them don't know when or how to stop being children.

My 39 year old son was lucky. He became deeply involved in the Boy Scouts. I am not sure, but I think the leadership skills he learned in the Scouts and the rights of passage that are the heart of the Scout's Tribe of Mic-O-Say program were critical to his development. Those rights of passage welcomed him into the world of adult men.

Most kids these days don't have similar rights of passage. They just don't know that it is time to start acting like an adult.

If you don't contemplate a career in the sciences or math, you don't need to know calculus.

Probability and statistics courses are much more useful for most people (and should be required for journalism sudents).

Sputnik. The scientific achievements of the USSR started a science and math catchup frenzy in the USA.

I went to a public school in a rich neighborhood and was pumped full of science and calculus, which serves me well to this day.

I cannot remember how well the young women did, although I know many were smarter than I was in many subjects.

Uh Bob, can you tell me how you can do statistics without calculus?

But what fields are they going into? In software engineering at least, boys still vastly outnumber girls..

As others have said, the space race accounted for the boom in the sixties in engineering and science. In the US the hot new fields are either finance (he got $3.7 billion in one year?!), bio-engineering or taking care of old people.

Smart sciency kids go into bio-engineering or pharmaceuticals. Smart non-science kids go into finance. Nobody wants to take care of the old people.

Globalization has ruined the market for engineers and computer scientists. The big money these days is in finance - making money off money or leaching money off somebody else's fortune.

"Today it's about a third. What accounts for this?"

I think much of it is due to 'regulatory' prodding in the form of AP requirements, schools looking for rankings, competitive pressure for school admission.

Would be interesting to track what percentage went on to complete advanced mathematics and engineering in college/university... or did most of the math stop at Calc I/Precalc.

You can learn a lot about Statistics without using Calculus if your goal is to be able to read scholarly articles, write popular articles, or go to Las Vegas.

Tripp: The big money these days is in finance

And even that may be headed out. See Cost-Cutting in New York, but a Boom in India.

Yes, we're doing a wonderful job of cannibalizing our economy.

Simple... talk to any College Professor. It's lower standards.

One data point. I am (or was) a girl who graduated high school in 1961, and I and several of my female friends took calculus. So it wasn't entirely 0%.

So it wasn't entirely 0%.

Don't they do rounding in calculus? ;-)

That's really pretty amazing, isn't it? I mean, forget the gender gap thing for the moment. I'd guess that in the 50s, roughly 0% of high school students took pre-calculus or calculus classes. Today it's about a third. What accounts for this?

One college kid told me how easy he thought calculus was. I looked at his textbook. He was right. Unbelievably dumbed down from earlier decades.

Resume-building.

For the past 40 odd years, high level thinking has been crammed down to lower and lower grades. Happens at all levels, college as well. My nephew did some limited forms of algebra this past year. He was in third grade.

I think it is both pedagogically and developmentally unsound, but every time I say that I get accused of wanting to lower standards. See, standards = hard.

For all the self important tools on this thread claiming that high school students today don't "really" understand calculus:

Unless you're a mathematician specializing in calculus, you don't understand it either. So STFU.

California has just this year decided that all 8th graders must take Algebra. That means the 7th graders in honors this year are expected to combine pre-Algebra and Algebra, so that they can go on to Geometry in 8th grade. Now I remember when Geometry was typically a 10th grade class....

My guess is that high schools tell their students on college-track that they should do four years of math. And nowadays, that's going to take you at least into calculus, don't you think?

High-school kids do more higher-level math every year. This has been going on for a long time--decades at least.

Apparently our "failing" schools are doing something right.

Kevin,

It's hard to forget the "gender gap thing," even for a moment, because it is serious business - and I mean business. There's an entire industry that's cropped up around female disadvantage and millions of federal grant dollars pouring into alleviating the gap. Well, "mission accomplished" - the gap seems to be largely
gone - or gone the other way. A quick glance (hey, it's 5:30am) at the underlying report shows that girls match or surpass boys in virtually all categories.

One notable exception is that the female sports participation rate is still substantially below the boys'. BUT it's more than doubled since 1982 AND in most other categories of after school activity the girls "rock" the boys. There's only so much time to devote to after school activites and it seems the girls have chosen to do other things.

Something tells me this one report won't put to bed the notion that girls are disadvantaged compared with boys. But maybe it's time to look at spending scarce grant dollars on other problems. It'll be a good test case for the idea that once there's a constituent group behind an issue, funding never goes away even if the
problem does.

Bob

Most of the "calculus" taught in high school is nothing but entering equations in a graphing calculator. It is easy to teach because the kids don't actually learn anything.

Ditto HS algebra. Things like factoring and solving equations are a thing of the past.

I would like to see the entire math curriculum in the U.S. moved up by about four years, along with teaching a second language starting in the first grade, and both of these things should be done for the same reason.

Students will have an easier time learning and mastering the language of math if they are taught the fundamentals of the language earlier, when their brains are still more impressionable.

This illustrates something I've witnessed as a public school teacher. Schools are doing more than they've ever done. And the "good" students are better than they've ever been.

But...the "bad" students are worse than they've ever been. And they are bringing down the average. But we still have to teach them.

The irony is: things aren't nearly as bad as we think they are, and worse than we think they are.