Availability of physics in US high schools
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.2446
Over the past three decades, the percentage of US high school students who take physics has steadily climbed—from 20% in 1986 to 33% in 1997 to 39% in 2013. In that same period, the proportion of high school seniors attending a school where physics was taught at least every other year has hovered around 95%. In the map above, states in yellow hold closely to that national average in availability, while states in blue exceed the average and those in red fall significantly below it; Hawaii opted out of the nationwide survey. More details from the survey can be found in High School Physics Availability by the American Institute of Physics’s Statistical Research Center; the report can be downloaded at http://www.aip.org/statistics/highschool

More about the Authors
Toni Feder. tfeder@aip.org