In any university-track school curriculum, calculus is a requirement, not an elective.
Yea, but the problems are the following:
1) except for engineering and math students, very few students will *take* higher math classes in college
2) the first two weeks of college calculus covered more then the entire year of high-school calculus. It's slowed down so people who want to go to college, but don't want to take math, can keep up.
3) learning abstract logic through programming in an expressive language like python or ruby (or perhaps some domain-specific language) is much more applicable to day-to-day life then calculus, which is only really used by engineers and scientists. Even math-heavy jobs like those in the accounting and finance fields don't use much calculus, do they?