The American high school has gotten out of hand.

I'm not talking about guns in schools or WASL testing or even freak dancing at the local Sadie Hawkins dance.

I'm talking about a polarization of learning that is extending into the classrooms of higher education.

And if you're a freshman at the UW, you probably already know what I'm talking about.

According to a recent New York Times article and report released by the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, there are currently two national conversations about high school.

The Commission's report, released in September, details how ill-prepared high school graduates are for college, citing statistics like the following: 40 percent of college students take remedial courses, and of the 1.2 million seniors in the class of 2006 who took the ACT, only 27 percent reached its "college-readiness" benchmark in biology, 42 percent in algebra, 53 percent in social science and 69 percent in English composition.

On the other end of the spectrum, according to The New York Times, there are increasing numbers of students dubbed as "zoomers" — fanatically hard-working high school students who zoom through high school coursework, blaze through Advanced Placement (AP) classes and enter college only to be disappointed by a decrease in required rigor.

Hailing from the most academically challenging public and private high schools in the nation, these students (and, in many cases, their base of knowledge from new "post-AP" classes) is forcing many professors to ask, "What's left to teach?"

Well, if America's education system is the student, the answer is plenty.

"It doesn't take a 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 schools, tension about college admissions permeates the atmosphere, and students push themselves to the limit," according to the article.

Where will the limit stop, however, as zoomer students push themselves harder and harder in high school only to be increasingly disappointed and frustrated and have the intellectual magic of college taken away?

Meanwhile, college classroom environments, now including these students' less challenged or even slightly less motivated peers, become mini-battlegrounds, microcosms of educational polarization.

As a graduate of a rigorous prep school that nearly-required the completion of demanding AP coursework and testing, to me many classrooms in my freshman year at the UW felt like polarized battlegrounds.

While zoomer students similar to myself attempted to race ahead in coursework (or in some cases gain an instructor's favor and attention through special projects) as we would have in demanding high school environments, college courses seemed to drag in monotony at the pace of other students.

Wasn't this what the development of AP testing was supposed to eradicate? Allowing achieving high school students a chance to skip hindering and remedial coursework?

Turns out the near-steroidal development of AP has only made matters worse.

While many colleges have recognized this dilemma and are now allowing zoomer-type undergraduates more earned autonomy in their study with an emphasis on independent research, this is far from the answer.

The ability to conduct independent research should be available to all students, and while there will always be high-achieving students, the emphasis should be on pushing standards among all high schools — not just pushing students harder.

Regrettably, this is all easier said than done.

As a nation, we have found that educational standards are not adequately enforced through standardized testing. And, as a system of higher education, we have found that changes in admissions processes have made college entrance no less competitive and fierce for students.

One hopes, however, that a middle ground in high school academic rigor can be found. Somewhere between the Preps and Academies and the suburban and rural schools of Western Washington, there exists a progression in education that truly leads to intellectual stimulation of every student.

And for all seats in all the classes that follow, one hopes we will find it.

Reach columnist Maureen Trantham at maureentrantham@thedaily.washington.edu