IMHO it is unsuitable for use with a HG+ math student as implemented in our district. It is a heavily spiral curriculum and characterized by endless constructivist drills where children "learn" to construct number relationships in different ways, etc. For someone with math talent a lot of this is just so much fluff.
I don't like EM- it just seems muddled. There have been times where my son had to "write what you like about math.".
I second both of these posts (plus a lot of what others said). My son detested EM and complained about it bitterly. In first grade, he'd say, "Why can't we just ADD?!?" In second grade, he had to cut pictures of triangles out of magazines and write a sentence about each president on US coins.
But I think that the worst thing about EM is that it gets things wrong in subtle ways. One example is a number chart that's used to teach adding and subtracting. It looks like a calendar that goes from 1-100. The problem is that there's no zero and 10 is at the end the first row. So each set of tens is off by one. As a result, kids don't see that the tens go from 10-19. They see 11-20. Like Jack'smom said, it's muddled.
If you're thinking of a charter school, I'd dig very carefully into their curriculum and the teacher qualifications. Don't believe the PR and don't believe the jolly glib stuff the principal will tell you. Do the teachers have subject-specific degrees or education degrees? What do they REALLY do in the gifted classroom? Do they go "wide and deep" instead of accelerating, and if so, how "wide and deep" can you really go in, say, basic arithmetic or AR-defined second grade reading? What's the cutoff? Is it based on a high IQ (130+) or do they pick the top 20% of the kids in the class based on something like grades or standardized testing?
My eldest goes to a supposedly math and science charter school. During the first semester, the Math Olympiad kids spent about a third of their time painting some things outside. One of the math teachers is, IMO, clearly unqualified (
see this thread). Obviously, not every charter school is like this, but I would advise checking carefully.
