My district uses the elementary version; I think it could benefit alot from picking up the secondary version recently put out by Addison-Wesley. As someone finishing up a masters in math ed, I can tell you the methodology is sound - check out their website or ERIC for references on supporting research. Most teachers that I've talked to like it after they get past the fact that it's "different". I like the fact that the elementary version was designed for use by instructors that don't necessarily have a math background.

Good program but hard to keep up with, especially for newer teachers. It's different from the way most of us learned math, so we have to learn a different way of doing and teaching on top of the prep involved.

My daughter's elementary prep school teaches this, but many students have trouble with it, including her. When she was in third grade, math homework was a functional nightmare. I have a bright kid, but her brain doesn't work with that methodology very well. We went to the head of the lower school to discuss it, but that's what they use to teach math, and they weren't budging on modifying their teaching to accomodate her. This from a *private* school, with a classroom size of around ten students.

In the fourth grade, she was struggling even more, so we enrolled her--advising the school that we were doing so--in Sylvan Learing Center. The school and Sylvan agreed to work together, but Sylvan teaches her arithmetic, not this Everyday Math carp. She is now in fifth grade, is tops in math, and her teacher has no problem with her learning arithmetic v. E.M. Moreover, on her report cards she's listed as not only being accelerated in math understanding, but the teacher can see her learning new concepts and broadening her understanding on an almost daily level.

Mind, we did not--repeat, did NOT--enroll her in Sylvan to get a jump on everybody else academically, no sir. She was a grade and a half behind everyone else in her mathematical understanding at the time of her enrollment, and now she's golden. She understands E.M., but she grasps arithmetic much better. And she's very aware through practical application that the real world revolves around doing arithmetic for solving math, not doing lattices.