As a student, it always felt like a mixture of "better to have it and not need it" and bog standard corruption.
Most teachers didn't use the advanced featutes, disliked that students played games on them during class, and had to jump through hoops to tamp down on cheating during exams. Many parents also had difficulty finding an extra $130 per child to pay for them; the schools wouldn't provide returnable ones like they did with textbooks.
In contrast, when I went to college (also in the US), we got a simple one-line "+-*/^" calculator for the first few years of calculus, engineering maths, etc.
Personally, I learned much better with the simple calculator. Complex graphing calculators do seem more suited to professional use than education.
Outside of education (where your lobbyists can ensure they are required by all students), there really are very few use cases for a complex graphing calculator. If you have access to a computer, Octave, Maxima, and Python (or any non-free equivalent) will run rings around any graphing calculator. For field use, the only point in favor of a graphing calculator as opposed to a phone app seems to be ruggedness.
Most teachers didn't use the advanced featutes, disliked that students played games on them during class, and had to jump through hoops to tamp down on cheating during exams. Many parents also had difficulty finding an extra $130 per child to pay for them; the schools wouldn't provide returnable ones like they did with textbooks.
In contrast, when I went to college (also in the US), we got a simple one-line "+-*/^" calculator for the first few years of calculus, engineering maths, etc.
Personally, I learned much better with the simple calculator. Complex graphing calculators do seem more suited to professional use than education.