High School Academics

On this pageDiploma requirements Classical Curriculum

Diploma requirements

High School Diploma Graduation Requirements

Reagan awards a single diploma. A graduate completes 24 credits in the distribution below, satisfies the community service obligation, and completes the English 12 capstone essay and public defense.

Subject area	Credits	UC a–g
English	4.0	b
Mathematics	4.0	c
Laboratory Science	4.0	d
History / Social Science	4.0	a
World Language	4.0	e
Electives, including 1.0 in Visual and Performing Arts	4.0	f, g
Total	24.0

Six courses a year across four years yields exactly 24 credits. A student who fails a course recovers the credit through approved outside coursework.

World language is part of the core, not an elective. The University of California requires two years and recommends three. Reagan requires four. A student who enters after grade 9 begins at the point of placement, with two years the minimum for graduation.

Community service

Every student completes a community service obligation before a diploma is conferred: hands-on voluntary service to non-profit or non-governmental organizations whose missions carry some component of goodwill toward human, animal, or environmental welfare. The school determines whether an activity qualifies.

California minimums

Private schools are not governed by the graduation requirements of Education Code §51225.3, which bind public districts. Reagan meets or exceeds those minimums in every subject, so that a Reagan transcript transfers cleanly.

Curriculum

Classical Honors Curriculum

Every student carries six courses: English, mathematics, laboratory science, history, world language, and one elective. The first five are the classical core. Each year stands in a single historical period, and every discipline stands in it together.

Grade 9 · The Ancient World

Where did our stories come from?

English	English 9 — Origins: Epic, Scripture, and Tragedy. Gilgamesh, Homer, Genesis and Job, Sophocles, the Gita, the Analects, Virgil, the Gospels, the Qur’an.
Mathematics	Geometry (standard) or Algebra 2 (accelerated). Euclid’s Elements Book I as a primary text; Babylonian and Egyptian numeration; Archimedes and the method of exhaustion. The Greek proof as the ancestor of the argumentative essay.
Science	Biology. Aristotle’s History of Animals and the birth of classification; Hippocratic medicine — then cell theory, genetics, and evolution as the correction of the ancient account.
History	The Ancient World. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China; the rise of the Abrahamic and Eastern religious traditions.
World Language	Spanish I or Mandarin I.
Elective	Advanced Placement or honors coursework, or Visual and Performing Arts.

Grade 10 · The Renaissance

What happened when a person became the measure?

English	English 10 — Rebirth: Humanism and the Invention of the Individual. Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hamlet, Othello, Marlowe, Milton, Cervantes.
Mathematics	Algebra 2 (standard) or Precalculus (accelerated). Cardano and the cubic; Napier’s logarithms; Descartes’ La Géométrie — the moment algebra and geometry become one subject.
Science	Chemistry. Alchemy to Boyle to Lavoisier; Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler; the birth of the controlled experiment and of the scientific paper as a form.
History	World History: Renaissance, Reformation, and Discovery. Italian city-states, the printing press, Luther, the Council of Trent, Atlantic exploration and its costs.
World Language	Spanish II or Mandarin II.
Elective	Advanced Placement or honors coursework, or Visual and Performing Arts.

Grade 11 · Modernism

What broke in 1900, and what was built after?

English	English 11 — The Break: American Literature and the Modern Crisis. Emerson, Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson, the founding documents, Eliot, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Miller.
Mathematics	Precalculus (standard) or AP Calculus AB (accelerated). Newton and Leibniz; non-Euclidean geometry — the first time Euclid’s fifth postulate is denied and the world does not end; Cantor’s infinities.
Science	Physics. Classical mechanics, then relativity and quantum theory; Michelson–Morley; Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as the century’s central metaphor.
History	United States History, 1877 to 1975 — Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement, reading the same documents the English course analyzes as rhetoric.
World Language	Spanish III or Mandarin III.
Elective	Advanced Placement or honors coursework, or Visual and Performing Arts.

Grade 12 · Post-Modernism

If there is no center, what holds?

English	English 12 — After the Center: Global Literature and the Argument About Meaning. Kafka, Camus, Beckett, Borges, Achebe, Márquez, Morrison, Wilson, Cisneros. Concludes in a capstone essay and public defense.
Mathematics	AP Calculus AB (standard) or AP Calculus BC or AP Statistics (accelerated). Probability and inference; chaos; fractal geometry; Gödel’s incompleteness theorems — the mathematical statement of the postmodern condition.
Science	Environmental Science or Computer Science. Complexity, systems, climate modeling; genomics; machine learning and the question of what a model knows.
History	Government and Economics. Required for graduation; taught against the contemporary global order.
World Language	Spanish IV or Mandarin IV.
Elective	Advanced Placement or honors coursework, or Visual and Performing Arts.

Two mathematics tracks

The standard track begins with Geometry in grade 9. A student who completed Geometry before enrolling begins at Algebra 2 on the accelerated track, which is the only route to AP Calculus BC.

Grade	Standard track	Accelerated track
9	Geometry	Algebra 2
10	Algebra 2	Precalculus
11	Precalculus	AP Calculus AB
12	AP Calculus AB	AP Calculus BC or AP Statistics

Twelve students to a class, and four courses a day.

Ask the admission office where your student would place, and what the first year would look like.

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