Dear Parents and Faculty,  

Central Bucks School District is strongly considering renewing their contract with Everyday Math. I have heard from many parents and teachers regarding their disdain for this program.  Not only is it costly, but its foundational principles are inadequate.  Please consider signing and sharing this petition.  As a result, we can illustrate to the district what their parents and faculty think of Everyday Math.

I strongly caution against re-adopting Everyday Math.  It is not preparing our students for math they will practice in middle, high school, and college.  Rather, it is leaving many students with a fragile foundation and a strong disdain for math.  Educators, parents, and mathematicians have declared the ineffectiveness and inadequacy of Everyday Math for years.  Furthermore, many parents from our district are forced to supplement math support services with private tutoring.

There seems to be a disconnect between the feelings and experience of parents and teachers and our administration.  Many parents and teachers in our district are highly dissatisfied with Everyday Math. The dissatisfaction with this program is echoed throughout the country, as countless districts have voted to abandon Everyday Math; including Franklin Lakes, South Orange-Maplewood, Wayne, Mt. Olive, Bridgewater-Raritan, Bernards Township, Ridgewood, Readington, and Westwood (all in NJ).  The state of Texas dropped EM, and countless other districts have dropped this program, including Radnor, PA.

Our math program should focus on more traditional algorithms and traditional based problem solving, rather than a spiraling approach that leaves students perplexed, confused, and without a sound foundation for future math excellence.  

Additional Reasons Everyday Mathematics should not be adopted in Central Bucks:

“EM is a not a program I’d recommend because it is extremely misleading. It claims to promote Conceptual Understanding, but in my opinion, it raises hope while dashing it mercilessly. It does not pay careful attention to the need of the painstaking build-up of skills, and when this happens in *mathematics*, you may as well bid farewell to conceptual understanding. What makes Everyday Math especially misleading is the fact that, when other programs are blatant about the de-emphasis of skills, Everyday Math camouflages this de-emphasis by the massive onslaught of a super-abundance of skills. If several skills are taught each week without allowing children the time to internalize the one or two key skills, the end result is that they learn nothing. But this tactics allows Everyday Math to claim that it has given skills their due and at the same time succeed in de-emphasizing them.”  (Prof. Hung-Hsi Wu, U.C. Berkeley Mathematics Department)

“I have deep concerns about Everyday Math on several levels. It spirals around concepts instead on focusing in-depth on mastery (multiplication and long division),” “When we ask students to apply it in later grades (high school physics for example) and they need a calculator to divide 54 by 9, it's a sign of a disconnect in mastery.”  (Alison Swanson, Science Teacher, West Aurora High School)

“If Everyday Math and similar programs are what is in store for implementing the common core standards for math, then I think we will continue to see an increase in remedial math instruction in high schools and colleges. Or at least an increase in the clientele of the private tutoring centers, which do teach basic math skills.”  (Stephanie Sawyer Math teacher at Juan Diego Catholic HS)

The state of Texas has dropped Everyday Math…saying it was leaving public school graduates unprepared for college. ( ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun)