A Queens mother who spent 13 years working inside New York City's public school system as a parent advocate says her own son's report card hid a much harsher reality: years of A's in math that collapsed into a 10 out of 100 on a high school test. Adriana Aviles says her 14-year-old, now a freshman at a top-rated Queens high school, received the highest math grade at his elementary school and As throughout kindergarten through eighth grade, with his lowest-ever grade a B-plus, yet he struggled to answer basic algebra, geometry and even elementary-school fraction problems once he hit ninth grade.
A Decade of A's, Then a 10 Out of 100
According to the New York Post, Aviles's son earned a 92 in sixth-grade math in 2023, an 89 in seventh-grade math in 2024, and a 93 in eighth-grade math in 2025 while attending PS 221Q North Hills Elementary School and later MS 67Q Louis Pasteur Middle School in Little Neck. He was enrolled in general education classes rather than advanced coursework and never took the Regents exam in middle school. Despite those grades, he was deemed not proficient in math on his seventh-grade state exam, the outlet reports.
The gap became impossible to ignore this fall, per the same account, when Aviles's son scored just 10 out of 100 on a high school math test and 78 on his first high school math exam this semester. His teacher reportedly told Aviles he answered only two of 10 multipart questions correctly. Aviles said she watched him attempt a math review worksheet and he could only complete the first couple of questions, and she has since bought math review books intended for first- through fourth-graders to help him catch up.
A Mother's Background in the System
Aviles, a former NYPD officer who married her husband, also an NYPD officer, in 2005 before the couple moved to District 26 in Douglaston that same year, has spent more than a decade as a PTA president, CEC president and now a leader on the Citywide Council on High Schools — described by Gothamist as a group made up of volunteer parents who advocate on behalf of all public high school students. She has championed Queens District 26 as one of the city's best school districts, which made the discovery more jarring for her, the Post reports.
Aviles said teachers never alerted her that her son was having trouble, and she believes the city's Department of Education grades according to rubrics that fudge the numbers. She said schools give little homework and allow students to revise graded test answers for a new grade, and argued that working-class parents without time to monitor schoolwork closely may be especially reliant on teachers and grading rubrics they assume reflect real performance. After her son's October test, she contacted other parents at his school, and the outlet reports those parents said their own children struggled with algebra too. Separately, a District 26 mother told the outlet her eighth-grade daughter received just one page of homework daily and that she was seeking Catholic school admission instead.
Confronting the Chancellor
Aviles's frustration came to a head on Monday, October 26, when she confronted Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels during a town hall in the auditorium at Art and Design High School. The meeting, held at the school's location at 245 East 56th Street, had been publicized in advance by CSI High School as a 6:30 p.m. town hall with Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels. Aviles told the chancellor the school system was failing children, comparing her son to the can in the game kick the can, and asked whether he would be passed along to college only to require her to pay for non-degree remedial classes. Per her account, Samuels responded in a way she described as failing to actually answer her question, and she left the stage and went straight home afterward.
Her son's high school must now provide the math education he missed in elementary and middle school, the Post notes. He currently receives tutoring during lunch Tuesday through Friday, and Aviles said he will begin Saturday tutoring once his baseball season ends. The teen also runs an online apparel-selling business, according to the outlet's reporting.
A Citywide Pattern Behind One Family's Story
Aviles's account lands amid broader citywide shifts in how New York City evaluates student progress. The NYC Department of Education reported that math proficiency for students in grades 3-8 rose 7.1 percentage points from 2023 to 2026, though results varied sharply by grade: third grade proficiency fell 2.5 points and eighth grade fell 1.6 points compared with 2025, even as fourth, sixth and seventh grades improved. The department has said math and ELA tests were realigned to new standards starting in 2023, making 2022 results incomparable to later years.
Chalkbeat reported that citywide reading proficiency fell 6 percentage points in the 2025-26 school year while math proficiency held flat at 57%, with nearly 44% of Black and Latino students proficient in math — each group's rate rising by less than one percentage point. The city's demographic breakdown also showed math proficiency climbing 0.6 points for Black students and 0.5 points for Hispanic students from 2025 to 2026, while falling 1.3 points for Asian students and 1.0 point for White students, per the department's own data.
The disconnect Aviles describes mirrors a pattern documented nationally. The New York Times has reported that nearly nine in 10 U.S. parents believe their child is performing at or above grade level in reading and math, even though national data show only 30 percent of eighth graders are proficient in reading and 28 percent in math. The gap between grades and test scores is especially pronounced in schools serving higher proportions of low-income students, according to a 2023 study cited by the Times, which also found that average high school math GPAs climbed from 3.02 in 2010 to 3.32 in 2022.
New York City schools are required to maintain written grading policies that are reviewed and updated annually, according to NYC Public Schools, with families entitled to a physical or electronic copy at the start of the school year describing how grades are determined and when report cards are issued. The department is also ending the Regents graduation requirement and shifting toward a Portrait of a Graduate model intended to grade students holistically with greater dependence on subjective teacher evaluation, changes that could further reshape how families judge their children's academic standing in the years ahead.
