I didn't mean to prioritize it, I'm saying that level of understanding should the goal of average achievement for high school graduates.

It is also really really far from what is being accomplished on average. High schools have seniors who can't do division and don't understand operations on fractions. Calculus is something anyone can understand, but it is seen by teachers as some super advanced mysterious stuff for rocket scientists while they struggle along to teach subtraction to 18 year olds.

Imagine a physical education fitness curriculum whose goal after 13 years of training was for 18 year olds to be able to turn over by themselves and begin to crawl. That's what we are doing, being satisfied with goals for graduates that shouldn't be challenging even for 6 year olds. It shouldn't be tolerated at all.

Schools that are graduating students with no math skills have had 13 years of failed instruction with these students. Not just one teacher along the way. All of them. The system should be burned to the ground and started over. That will never happen though, it's too corrupt and incompetent. Myself I've given up hope reform of the system is possible.

Speaking as a recent high school graduate, please, please don't give up. I made it out of school knowing calculus and more because I had one physics teacher and one math teacher that hadn't given up. They wrote their homework themselves, used college textbooks and twenty-year-old texbooks they'd collected from eBay, and railed constantly at the district's purchasing people. They weren't able to change the system all by themselves, but they still made - and continue to make - all the difference for dozens or hundreds of students. You can do the same. Please.

To expect all students to take calculus is prioritizing. There has to be some give and take.

In any case, I believe the OP was asking why it's important that every student takes calculus? I'm very curious about that as well. Why again is that so important?

Here as well - please don't just down vote but please explain why you are if you are going to.

I don't see why we can't learn both. I really enjoyed AP Statistics. It was a class I took my senior year of high school because AP Calc scared me, and it ended up being a very rewarding and memorable experience, but I regret not having taken AP Calc alongside of it. Better statistical reasoning is something society might benefit more from as a whole, but I feel like that first (college) year sequence in Calculus is something that everyone should experience, be it in college or high school.

I know a lot of people who struggled in classes like Algebra 2 and Precalculus (which is kind of an abomination in retrospect) who finally learned to appreciate the power of mathematics by going through Calculus. Not everyone will walk away with that perspective, but I feel like society can only benefit from a greater respect for math.

I really do wish there were courses available in discrete math at high school level.

Probability, graph theory, statistics, number theory, game theory, groups, sets, logic , these are topics which can be interesting and basics of them can be taught before college. Similarly, linear algebra is not that scary.

I completed Calculus BC test in my Junior year in HS and went to nearby University for Calculus 3(forget what it was called exactly), got a bad professor with worse English than mine and burned out of math for a long time. I was under the mistaken impression that Calculus was end of all math.

Differentials and integrals are part of life. People need to be able to understand when a politicians is giving them the differential of the figure they asked for, rather than the figure itself.

But yes, statistics is very important too, for similar reasons.