I was creating a web form for a client who requested the highest-grade completed for primary and high school and then college.
The original paper form had the following
Circle highest grade completed 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 College 1 2 3 4
For the web form, I turned these into two dropdowns. Labeling College was easy, but the 1-12 was harder.
Due to space issues, I chose "Compulsory" as grades 1-12 in the US are compulsory, but my project manager felt it wasn't a layman term, so I switched it for K-12, which is what the Department of Education calls it, even though kindergarten is not included.
So, my question is, is there a one-word (or very short phrase) equivalent to Primary + High School?
Best Answer
The answers and comments to this question have already demonstrated that it varies across the country. I would have answered that the terms "Primary School" and "Grade School" both refer to elementary, middle, and high school collectively.
According to Wikipedia, the government considers "elementary school" to cover anything up to grade 8, whereas in my experience it's only considered to extend to grade 5.
Because of these ambiguities, I think that "K-12" is the only real answer to your question that works regardless of who the user is (as long as they're from the US.)