For 13 years, Adriana Aviles, a fierce education advocate and former NYPD cop, has been the ultimate insider in New York City schools. As a powerful leader on the Citywide Council on High Schools, she championed Queens District 26 as one of the best in the city. She knew the principals and the teachers — and trusted them. She was gratified that her son consistently received good grades, especially in math, throughout his K-8 years. Then, two weeks ago, she sat down with her 14-year-old son to help him review for his second math exam. What happened next left her stunned and the high school freshman devastated — and prompted her to publicly confront Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels at a town hall last week. She shared her family’s experience with The Post’s David Spector.
All through middle school, my son was, at least on paper, a numbers whiz. His report cards consistently showed A’s — his lowest grade was a B plus. But when he slid down to a 78 on his first exam at a top high school in Queens this fall, I pulled up a chair to help him review for his next test.
I’ll never forget seeing tears well up in my son’s eyes as he was only able to answer the first couple of questions on the math review worksheet.
He couldn’t solve basic algebra. He couldn’t do geometry. He couldn’t compute elementary-school fractions.
Yet at PS 221Q, the North Hills Elementary School, he regularly received the highest grade in math. At MS 67Q Louis Pasteur Middle School in Little Neck, his lowest math grade on an end-of-term report card was an 89 in seventh grade. He got a 92 in sixth grade and a 93 in eighth grade — the equivalent of As.
When he was admitted to his first choice high school, one New York’s top-rated schools, we had every reason to believe he would continue to excel.
What I saw when I sat down with my son to study shocked me to my core.
He stared blankly at the page, completely puzzled by the material. He was completely thrown off by equations that contained fractions.
My shock soon gave way to heartbreak, then anger.
My son is a mature, smart, industrious kid who has his own online business selling apparel. He doesn’t like to show when things are bothering him. As I saw tears fill his eyes, I was heartbroken. I told him that it wasn’t his fault; the system failed him, and we would do whatever it takes to get him caught up.
I didn’t talk to anybody that night about, not even my husband.
When I received a call from his teacher after he took the test, I told her I already knew why she was calling.
She told me he got only two of 10 multi-part questions right, and scored a 10 out of 100.
His high school is now stuck having to provide him the math education he should have received in elementary and middle school.
I’ve resorted to buying my son math review books intended for first- through fourth-graders so I can see how much he actually knows, and in which grade did he stop learning.
My son now misses lunch every Tuesday through Friday to get tutoring, and when baseball season is over he’ll get tutoring on Saturdays as well.
I’m the child of immigrants; my parents came to this country from Colombia and my mother always instilled a deep love of education in my sisters and me. She was always on top of us to make sure we were doing our work and drilled the importance of a high school diploma into our heads.
The work ethic she imparted on me gave me the tools I needed to become an NYPD police officer, and I passed on those values when I became a parent of my own.
When I married my husband, also an NYPD officer, in 2005, I insisted we move to District 26 in Douglaston, because it’s one of the best school districts in the entire city.
Had my son’s teachers just told me he was having trouble, we could have gotten him the help he needed early on. He would have done the work. But we were never told that. And the grades never gave us a clue.
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.
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?
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