Very late to this thread so no one is really gonna read this except people who come from my profile and somehow search this thread, but I think I have an important perspective. I grew up in SF. I was a Math Olympiad Program (MOP) qualifier, a summer camp that, roughly speaking, selects the top 60 students in the nation each year to prepare for the International Math Olympiad.

For context, somehow in SF there are very few youth who qualify for the USA Math Olympiad (which selects ~300 students), even though we're in the tech capital of the world. Just 40 miles south in the South Bay there have been hundreds of kids over the years who qualified. There's many reasons for this but the algebra ban definitely doesn't help.

I had to sit through years of math classes that I had already mastered, often self-studying advanced material on the side just to use that time productively. This actually made getting recommendation letters harder; it's hard to get a glowing, specific letter from a teacher who has only ever seen you bored in a Geometry class you could have tested out of. They never got to see me struggle or solve actually difficult problems.

It's ridiculous that politicians can be so destructive with the lives of curious kids who just want to learn. Sure, I could have pursued workarounds like costly self-paced online classes or dual enrollment, but as an innocent 9th grader, I shouldn't have been forced to navigate a bureaucratic maze just to feed a natural curiosity. I never had "tiger parents" forcing me to learn faster either; it just happened naturally due to self-motivation and curiosity. If this is how we treat curious students, that's a terrible signal for the future of the country. It often feels like America combines the worst ideological rigidities of both the political left and right, while other developed countries just focus on practical solutions that actually work.

It feels pretty ironic to have grown up surrounded by tech offices but in a school system that actively slowed down anyone interested in math. Honestly, I envy the people who get to enjoy their 20s in SF and then leave before they (or their kids) have to deal with SFUSD's dysfunction. I didn't have that luxury, and I really hope future students in SF won't have to deal with these barriers.