Statistics and data analysis are rapidly growing in importance in the U.S. secondary school curriculum due in part to the establishment in 1997 of an Advanced Placement exam in Statistics and also to the inclusion of statistics standards in many states. (The Advanced Placement exams are national exams that can lead to an award of college credit to students with sufficiently high scores). However most secondary school teachers have backgrounds in mathematics with little or no training in statistics and there is no specific certification in statistics. At best teachers recruited to teach statistics will have had a mathematical statistics course although such courses often fail to teach fundamental statistical topics such as experimental design and data analysis
