“Saxon Math, anyone?”
Saxon is good.
Math-U-See is good, too.
I think the main problem here is not algebra in the 9th grade but the foundation that allows students to move on to algebra. .
That’s why the private school and homeschool curricula are so great. They get the foundation established early on through concepts, repetition, and review.
We use Math-U-See. The emphasis is heavy on place value notation in the elementary years, and skip counting to lead naturally to multiplication. My fifth grader is very strong, never having had to memorize a single field from a multiplication table. Yee haw!