Gazette: Accelerated math classes leave students playing catch-up

Parents, teachers concerned MCPS curriculum pushes children into higher math classes without building foundation

...The Montgomery County Public Schools math curriculum remains "a mile wide and an inch deep" even as an increasing number of sixth- and seventh-graders begin studying algebra, according to Nancy Feldman, a former long-term substitute teacher in math at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda who now tutors students in math...

...Negative effects of acceleration can reach into later high school and college years, according to Doug Prouty, president of the county's teachers union and a member of the Math Workgroup.

"The school system is concerned with the number of students who are taking remedial courses when they enter Montgomery College," Prouty said. "That itself is something that we need to work on, so that students don't need to begin their college careers taking remedial courses."
Montgomery College does see a large number of students with a "calculator dependency" when it comes to more basic math concepts, according to Margaret Latimer, chair of the math department at the college's Germantown campus. Different grades should also matter when considering acceleration, she said.
"We know that our C students do not do well when they go on to the next course," Latimer said.
At the Huntington Learning Center in Bethesda where tutoring and remedial academic work takes place, the center's owner Mark Schlossberg said Huntington's evaluations of students show that many times, seventh-graders have the exact same "gaps" in math as 11th-graders. He said these gaps have become more pronounced over the last decade...