Sounds like my experience.

I worked with both my kids at home doing math puzzles, riddles and calculation nearly every day after school from K-5th grade. My son was extremely quick and talented in math no matter what I threw at him. At the end of one school year in middle school he came home and it showed the school had handed out the schedule for the next year. I saw they had placed him in the 'average/slacker/loser' math class, not the accelerated or gifted. I emailed the teacher and asked why he was not in the upper level math. She replied he hadn't shown enough talent. I insisted she was very wrong about this and asked her to reconsider. She would not. I then demanded she test him, as I believed he should have been in the 'gifted' math and I just wasn't going to accept this poor placement.

She gave me plenty of push-back and finally went to the principal to 'get permission.' Principal said that he had to pass 3 tests of increasing difficulty, and if he didn't pass the first one with a high enough score, there was no point in going further.

Well, he aced each one. She said she just couldn't understand it and that this was highly irregular. So, they did agree to put him in the gifted math. He got straight 'A's which then allowed him to be placed into the AP classes during high school.

By the end of his senior year in HS, he had gotten 'A's' in 23 AP classes and was hired by a professional tutoring company to tutor students in calculus, chemistry and English.

Fast forward. He graduated university with 3 bachelor's degrees earned simultaneously, and was hired as a mathematical analyst for a private equity firm making the big bucks. He's now in line for VP and is only 31.

I often wonder how his options would have been if I hadn't tutored him and knew personally his natural talent and pushed back from letting them place him in that slacker math class...