It's a warning to any parents of younger children: Unless something has changed radically in the past 8 years, your child will be put into a math track in 6th grade: Separated into standard, accelerated and advanced classes. Which track you're in is determined by grades, standardized tests and teacher input after 5th grade.
This track determines which classes you can take in 7th and 8th. If you were in the advanced class, you will have finished Algebra 1 by the end of 8th grade. This allows the student to begin 9th grade taking Algebra 2, and then extending from there so that by their senior year they can take AP Calculus.
If you want little Suzy to be in more advanced classes, you better be prepared to be the most vocal Tiger Mom Karen you can imagine, because you'll have plenty of competition. As a result, almost no child moves between tracks. And in fact, in my opinion, the difference between normal and accelerated is so little, I'm pretty sure it's there just to give those children somewhere to go.
In other words, if your child doesn't demonstrate math skills as an 11yo, they will unlikely be able to take AP calculus 7 years later without doing something extra like taking summer classes, redoing an entire school year (an option a fellow parent I know took), or extraordinary effort like that.
Even if the MVLA education system isn't exactly the same now, or you live in a district that does something totally different, or even if you're in another state, I suspect this sort of thing is happening everywhere.
I personally was happy my son was in accelerated classes, right up until 9th grade when I realized how this circumscribed his future options for classes. In the end he would never have wanted to take AP Calculus, so it was fine. But I personally felt like I had fucked up as a parent because I simply wasn't paying attention. Planning out your kid's future math classes in detail in the 5th grade never crossed my mind, or if it had, I would have dismissed it as ludicrous overparenting! Had I known, I might have sent him to a math camp or something if I had realized how important the difference between a B+ and an A in math was at that moment. And he my have really gotten into mathematics as a subject. I really don't know.
So anyways, that's my experience. California is such a massive change from where I grew up in rural NH, I honestly can't imagine where to begin to fix a system with so many millions of children from such a varied socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. I barely got my one kid through the system unscathed, and I live in one of the wealthiest districts in the country.