"The Incredibles"

"COLLEGE MATH? No problem. Suzanne Buckwalter, center, leads two Phillips Academy students, Peter Dignard and Sarah Dewey, through a calculus equation."

The NY Times covered some of America's most academically challenging high schools:

QUIZ yourself: One American history course gets at pre-Civil War tensions through primary source readings, including William Lloyd Garrison’s editorial from The Liberator in 1831 and Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech. A second American history course leans on primary sources, too. Students parse each Supreme Court justice’s opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott decision as well as texts of the first and second Lincoln-Douglas debates. Students must also demonstrate knowledge of historic maps.

So which is college and which is high school? Which is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and which Dalton, the private K-12 school on Manhattan’s East Side? If you can’t tell, you can see why students who graduate from high-powered high schools experience academic déjà vu even at elite colleges and universities. (The first course is M.I.T.’s, the second Dalton’s.)...

...It doesn’t take a genius — or a precocious high school student — to understand that ramped-up achievement is tightly connected to ramped-up competition for slots at prestigious colleges. At top high schools, tension about college admissions permeates the atmosphere, and students push themselves to the limit. But with so much college coursework before college, educators say, the academic progression is out of whack.

“We are pushing kids to do so many things to get in, so what do you do when you get in?” asks Terrel Rhodes, vice president for quality, curriculum and assessment for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in Washington, D.C. “If high schools are teaching more and more of what we have been doing the first year in college, what is it college needs to do?” ...

Read more about the changing secondary school landscape here.