My personal opinion, formed after quite extensive experience with Abeka, is that it's pretty good in the very early years, but quite insufficient in the middle/high school years.
Abeka is a curriculum written by and for the Pensacola Christian College education program, and/or its founders. The Pensacola Christian College founders and administration also run a couple of schools (elementary, middle, high) that are private (Pensacola Christian Academy).
Here's my problem with it: Pensacola Christian College is very strict, and very firm in their beliefs. (That's not the problem, that is their right.) However, I felt that their strict adherence to their religious beliefs limited their curriculum in the older years. My son was in an Abeka school in for part of 6th and most of 7th grade, and when we moved and he transferred to a regular public school, he was extremely behind. Not only did he not know or have a mastery of the math the public school was doing, he had never even been introduced to some of the concepts. And in literature and history and social studies, he also was not up to par with the public school students. I learned that Abeka did not approve of some of the classic books (I'm not talking about a debate over Harry Potter, but things like basic Greek mythology and historical events that the Abeka authors omitted).
Another problem I have is that Pensacola Christian College is not accredited (they apparently are working towards accreditation with some agency but it's not the typical accreditation that a college can claim), and I worry about a curriculum written by a non-accredited institution (they admittedly say that they don't want the traditional accreditation due to their beliefs). It almost seems that the Abeka curriculum is designed to teach teachers to teach students in their own school, who will in turn grow up to attend Pensacola Christian College and repeat the cycle (that's not a fact, that's my feeling after doing a lot of looking into it).
And this is not a personal bias. I am a Christian, and I have an education degree (elementary ed) and my children have attended public schools and private Christian schools and private non-Christian schools, plus they've had some home-schooling, too (dh is military and we've moved a lot!) So I have seen all kinds of curricula. I just don't like the limitations of the middle and high school Abeka curriculum. And I don't like the fact that its written by and for a non-accredited organization. But in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, even first and second grades, it seems ok.
It depends, I guess, on whether an Abeka curriculum is ok for you for a couple of years, and whether you're ok with transferring to a more standard curriculum once your child is in 2 grade or above, or whether you prefer to continue with an Abeka curriculum all throughout school.
