Jessica Hentrel's accelerated algebra studies four years ago at Bethesda's Westland Middle School seemed to be going smoothly until her report card gave the game away. Her mother, Jennifer, began seeing low Cs and Ds pop up on report cards, and she began to realize that even though her daughter didn't admit it, the faster pace of her studies was a little too fast.

"Her grades weren't really improving to where they thought they should be," said Jennifer Hentrel, a Silver Spring resident, who placed Jessica at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Olney after eighth grade. "There are just some basics that she didn't know."

The troubles of Jessica Hentrel and other students in accelerated math have led to growing concern among parents and educators that even bright students have gaps in basic knowledge such as multiplication tables, long division and fractions that come back to haunt them in later grades and college.

The school system's new Math Workgroup, formed last year, is in the process of looking at several issues in county math education, including acceleration, as concerns continue from educators and parents about acceleration. The group consists of math teachers, parent representatives, school administrators and others, and is scheduled to issue recommendations to the Board of Education in the late winter or early spring.

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.

"Very few are comfortable with fractions, decimals and percents. That's consistent across the board," Feldman said of students in Algebra I and higher courses.

Still, the state data shows that the percentage of middle school students at proficient or advanced levels in the Maryland School Assessments math test increased from 57.5 percent in 2003 to 74.5 percent in 2009.

Most of the change comes from the percentage of students who scored at the low and high ends. The number of students with basic skills dropped from 42.5 percent to 25.6 percent from 2003 to 2009, while the number of students with advanced skills jumped from 26.7 percent to 38.7 percent over the same time period.

The school system's goals for the number of students in accelerated math are also increasing: 80 percent of eighth-grade students were expected to take Algebra I, normally taught to ninth-graders on a standard track, or some form of advanced math this school year. This is an increase from 67 percent in 2007-2008. Some sort of algebra preparation class is the standard track for eighth-graders.

The issue of acceleration is a nationwide concern, noted Betsy Brown, direct of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in MCPS's Office of Curriculum and Instructional Programs, and some of the analytical work goes on at the level of individual schools.

"Local schools address individual students' needs — when grades or comprehension drops — to identify the varying reasons for the decrease," she said.

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.

"Schools are not remedial by nature," Schlossberg said.

In a video presentation to the work group on Oct. 29, William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University, recommended that talented math students, instead of being rewarded for success by pushing them further ahead in the curriculum, should be allowed to explore more deeply into subject matter.

"Most countries in the world do not track kids into different content," Schmidt said. "They're all taking the same mathematics, no matter how bright they are in mathematics."

A good deal of the responsibility still lies with the parents, however, said Laurie Rodman of Potomac. She noted that she overrode a previous teacher's recommendation that her son might have trouble with certain accelerated courses prior to eighth grade. The school and the teachers, she said, have always been available to help.

"Nobody's shoving anything down your throat," Rodman said.