You don't want to move to Taiwan, it's a crazy pressured school system with a lot of tutoring and parental pressure. We use Singapore math, which is marketed as great because Singapore has great standards. But I think it's mostly that Singaporean kids are highly pressured and tutored.
One of the things that is difficult is getting a mathy child exposure to hard problems, especially if one is trying to rely on elementary school teachers. I think in part it is an extension of the same issue parents here mention at times, of not realizing just how high they need to go to find the right level of material. Also, I don't think very many elementary school teachers have been exposed to (or perhaps, are able to solve themselves) the types of problems that could present a challenge. I expect that if they see a problem that they don't really know how to do, they're unlikely to feel comfortable assigning it to a student. Unfortunately, that's the level of difficulty that a mathy kid needs.
My DD's excellent K teacher had something interesting to say recently. The PTB had found her a book with some word problems. My DD can't read, so the teacher sat down with her during free play to take her through a few problems. (I know, we are lucky)
The teacher said "I sat down with her and read through the problem, but she didn't seem to really understand it. I went home and thought no, she's just not ready for it. But the next day I thought I'd give it another try, and she had them figured out". Yes, because you taught her how the day before!
It's so interesting that her gut feeling was that if you need to be taught something you're not ready for it. I'm sure she doesn't have that thought when she's teaching kids to read or count. But it definitely illustrates how these kids are expected to be perfect and computational errors are taken to be signs that they're not ready for the work. Does every child need to get 100% every time before they are allowed to move to the next grade?
We're also figuring out how to politely tell the school that the test they're planning on is one or two grade levels too low.
