For 13 years, Adriana Aviles, a passionate education advocate and former NYPD officer, was deeply connected to New York City’s school system. As a prominent member of the Citywide Council on High Schools, she proudly represented Queens District 26, which she considered one of the city’s strongest districts. She knew the principals, trusted the teachers and believed her son was thriving. Throughout his K-8 education, he earned consistently strong grades, particularly in math. But two weeks ago, Aviles sat down with her 14-year-old son to prepare for his second math exam. The experience left her shaken and her high school freshman overwhelmed — and led her to challenge Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels publicly at a town hall last week. She described her family’s ordeal to The Post’s David Spector.
On paper, my son had always been a math standout in middle school. His report cards were filled with A’s, and his lowest grade was a B-plus. But after he scored a 78 on his first exam at a prestigious Queens high school this fall, I sat down with him to prepare for the next test.
I will never forget watching tears gather in my son’s eyes as he struggled to answer more than the first few questions on his math review sheet.
He could not solve basic algebra problems. Geometry confused him. Even elementary-school fractions were beyond his grasp.
That was a shocking contrast to his years at PS 221Q, North Hills Elementary School, where he routinely earned the top math grade. At MS 67Q Louis Pasteur Middle School in Little Neck, his lowest math mark on an end-of-term report card was an 89 in seventh grade. He earned a 92 in sixth grade and a 93 in eighth grade — grades equivalent to A’s.
After he was accepted to his first-choice high school, one of New York’s highest-rated schools, we had every reason to expect that his academic success would continue.
But sitting beside my son as he studied revealed a reality that shocked me to my core.
He looked at the page without understanding it, completely lost in the material. Equations involving fractions left him especially confused.
The shock quickly turned into heartbreak — and then anger.
My son is mature, intelligent and hardworking. He even runs his own online apparel business. He usually keeps his struggles to himself, so seeing tears in his eyes broke my heart. I told him none of this was his fault. The system had failed him, I said, and we would do whatever was necessary to help him catch up.
That night, I did not tell anyone what had happened — not even my husband.
After my son took the test, his teacher called me. I told her I already knew why she was reaching out.
She said he had answered only two of the 10 multipart questions correctly and received a score of 10 out of 100.
Now his high school must provide the math instruction he should have received during elementary and middle school.
I have started buying math workbooks designed for first- through fourth-graders so I can determine what he truly understands — and identify the point at which he stopped learning.
My son now gives up his lunch period every Tuesday through Friday for tutoring. Once baseball season ends, he will also receive tutoring on Saturdays.
I am the daughter of immigrants. My parents came to the United States from Colombia, and my mother instilled in my sisters and me a deep respect for education. She closely monitored our schoolwork and made sure we understood how important earning a high school diploma would be.
The discipline and work ethic she taught me helped me become an NYPD officer. When I became a parent, I passed those same values on to my son.
When I married my husband, who was also an NYPD officer, in 2005, I insisted that we move to District 26 in Douglaston because it is regarded as one of the best school districts in New York City.
If my son’s teachers had told me he was struggling, we could have secured help much earlier. He would have put in the work. But no one alerted us, and his grades gave us no indication that he was falling behind.
I know now that teachers grade according to a rubric — and that DOE fudges the numbers. The NYC education system had betrayed my son to make itself look better.
What made this betrayal worse is I’ve worked with the teachers and administrators at my son’s schools for years.
I’m a longtime parent leader, I’ve served as PTA president, CEC president, and I now sit on the Citywide Council on High Schools. I’ve formed close relationships with educators at every stop.
I became active in my children’s education because I knew that the only way to be truly informed was to be involved. I thought I was fully aware of how my son was doing in school.
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I was so wrong.
My son wasn’t in advanced classes, he was in general education, he didn’t take the Regents in middle school. I relied on his teachers to tell me the truth about how he was doing.
I failed too. I didn’t scrutinize his work closely or check his performance on state test scores because I figured if his report cards were good then everything was fine.
It was only recently, after I realized how far behind he is, that I looked back and discovered he was deemed “not proficient” in math on a seventh-grade state exam.
How can he not be proficient in math but was receiving As?
Why didn’t his middle school ever give him additional resources?
I feel deceived.
Looking back, there were warning signs. The teachers barely gave homework. He was allowed to revise his answers on tests after they were graded — and get a new grade. Teachers had a surprisingly laid-back attitude about missed assignments.
There are so many working-class parents in the NYC school system who don’t have the time to closely monitor their kids’ schoolwork and rely on their teachers — and the grading rubrics — to be honest. The lack of rigor in city schools and the inflation of grades are dishonest.
This is one of the reasons so many families are leaving the school system.
The DOE enables failure in minority communities by constantly lowering their standards instead of grading our children accurately and failing to collaborate with families to address issues they may be having. They don’t even police chronic absenteeism. How can our kids get jobs if they can’t read or do math, or are even taught the value of showing up?
I soon found out my family was not alone in feeling cheated.
Shortly after my son’s October test, I reached out to other parents in his school to ask if their kids were also struggling in algebra. The responses were overwhelming; so many said that they were and asked what tutoring options were available.
I spoke to a mother of an eighth-grade girl who was apoplectic about her daughter’s math curriculum. She said her daughter, who is also in District 26, was only getting one page of homework a day and she’s urgently trying to get her into Catholic school.
That’s when I knew I had to use my position in the public school system to speak out for all of the families who have been failed by the system.
I decided to confront Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels about it a Community Council on High Schools town hall on Monday, Oct. 26.
The DOE is ending the Regents requirement to graduate and moving to the “Portrait of a Graduate” model, which is supposed to grade students in a “holistic” manner that is even more dependent on subjective teacher evaluation. All of these problems will just get worse as we abandon more objective metrics.
I was already planning on asking Samuels about this at the town hall, but after seeing what happened to my son, I knew I had to share what my family had been through.
“This school system is failing our children. . . . I equate this to the childhood game ‘Kick the Can.’ My my son is the can. Where did he land?” I tearfully said as I sat on the dais in the Art and Design High School Auditorium.
As I choked back tears, I made clear to the chancellor that the system’s failure would be felt by my family for years to come.
“In high school, where they are expected to help him graduate with the necessary tools to succeed, will they continue to kick the can all the way to college, where I will be expected to pay for a remedial class that does not count toward a degree?” I asked.
Finally, I pressed Samuels on the upcoming Portrait of a Graduate changes. How could we not expect to see what happened to my son happen to thousands of more students if grades are now even more dependent on the subjective judgments of biased teachers and principals?
Samuels seemed taken off guard by my comments. And his response disgusted me. He didn’t even acknowledge my question. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He was stammering and didn’t know what to say. It just sounded like mumbo jumbo. As a parent, and a longtime parent leader, I was entitled to a real response. I would have preferred a slick non-answer that politicians give, but he didn’t even give me that.
I had to walk off stage after that. Usually, after these events I stick around and pose for pictures with the DOE officials in attendance, but I went straight home that night.
I couldn’t pose for pictures with Samuels. If he can’t answer how we’re going to educate our children, who can?