Secret of Everyday Math Revealed

If Everyday Math can claim any success, I think I may have found the reason.  While looking around the EDM website, I found this quote on their main page:

“It is currently being used in over 185,000 classrooms by almost 3,000,000 students.”

http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/about/

Using long division (no calculators were harmed in the writing of this post), the average class size is a miraculous 16.22 students.  I guess with that size of class, the teacher can pay individual attention to the needs of each student to help them overcome the EDM program.  Tell that to the NYC math teachers.

As I looked further around the site, I found this quote:

“Over 2.8 million students in 175,000 classrooms are currently using Everyday Mathematics.”

http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/educators/

An even better 16.0 students per class, on the page used to advertise to educators.  Great!

So, class, what did we learn?  What everyone learns in math.  Check your answers.  Obviously no one at Everyday Math checked the class size, probably because they couldn’t do long division and they didn’t have a calculator. 

What else did we learn?  That Everyday Math has a problem with consistency.  It appears likely that EDM put up these pages at two different times.  Let us hope that the second set of numbers is more recent than the first (and that the usage trend is DOWN).

Is this the program you want for your children?

Brian BTN