Anything from the University of Chicago,

whether it is politicians, economists, or textbook authors, should be automatically suspect.  Textbook authors from defunct programs, as the University of Chicago ditched its education program almost a decade ago, should be most suspect of all.

But no.  The most notable atrocity stemming from the defunct education department, Everyday Math, is still used in school districts all over the United States, including my old district.  Instead of teachers swearing by the program, they swear at it, cursing the idiotic "spiral" technique also employed by Saxon Math and baffled by the bizarre algorithms used in this program.  Case in point is the ancient and archaic "lattice method" for teaching multiplication.  There is a reason why this algorithm was dumped in favor of the more familiar method of cross-multiplying and adding up the columns, and that has to do with sheer confusion of the method.  The "partial products" method is almost as bad as the lattice method.

No wonder so many students ended up in special ed because of a "math disability."

I totally despised these algorithms, and I refused to teach them to kids.