Why is my A student failing algebra?

Adriana Aviles' son was an A student in math in New York City K-8 schools, she tells David Spector of the New York Post. He got into a top high school. But her honor-roll student is failing algebra.

She tried to help him study. "He stared blankly at the page, completely puzzled by the material. He was completely thrown off by equations that contained fractions." He scored a 10 out of 100 on the test.

Her son now spends four lunch periods a week getting math tutoring to learn the skills he didn't learn in elementary school. Aviles bought "math review books intended for first- through fourth-graders so I can see how much he actually knows, and in which grade he stopped learning."

They live in Queens District 26, considered one of the best in the city. She worked with teachers and administrators at her son's schools, served as PTA president and Community Education Council president, and sits on the Citywide Council on High Schools. Now she feels betrayed by the system that passed him along and the teachers who never told her he needed help.

"I failed too," she writes. "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." She trusted the grades.

Only recently did she check and realize he'd scored “not proficient” in math on a seventh-grade state exam. But he was getting A's.

Looking back, she sees signs that she missed. There was little homework and a "laidback attitude about missed assignments." Students could revise answers on tests to get a higher grade.

When Aviles told her son's story to Chancellor Kamar Samuels at a town hall last week, she noted that New York is moving from Regents tests to a subjective “Portrait of a Graduate” model. It will be even easier to "kick the can" down the road, she predicts, passing students along without the skills they need for success.

This isn't just a New York City problem, tweets Catherine Johnson in response to Aviles. "The only reason this didn’t happen to us in our super-expensive suburban school district is that I happened to clean out my 4th grader’s backpack one day & discovered a math test with a grade of 68." The teacher said: “Don’t worry, he understands the concepts.” But he didn't. "I eventually realized my son didn’t have a freaking clue about the concepts or anything else." The next year I gave him the Singapore Math placement test, discovered he was 2 years behind, then bought the Saxon Math books & marched the two of us through them one lesson at a time." It worked, she writes. "He’s teaching algebra this year."

Teachers can avoid conflict by inflating grades, writes Joshua Dwyer in Grade Inflation Nation on Education Progress. There are no rewards for delivering bad news.

Most parents rely on report cards -- not test scores -- to assess how their child is doing in school, surveys show. A 2023 Learning Heroes study, 79 percent of parents said their child received mostly B's or better, and almost nine in 10 thought their child was at or above grade level in reading and math, Dwyer notes. "These numbers are wildly out of step with reality."

When grades are low, parents invest in tutoring, a 2026 working paper finds. "When grades are high, but test scores are low, parents do not invest."

Parents are starting to catch on to grade inflation, reports Linda Jacobson on The 74, citing new data from Learning Heroes. But the "urgency gap" is huge.

"Teachers' unions and allied advocacy groups have spent years framing standardized tests as reductive, biased, and harmful," writes Dwyer. They talk about “teaching to the test” and “reducing kids to a number." Many parents don't trust test scores.

In addition, standardized test scores arrive months late, often when the school year is over, while report cards arrive every quarter. "Parents understandably weigh the signal that shows up when there is still time to do something about it, even if that signal is unreliable."

A few states are banning grade-inflating policies, such guaranteeing a minimum score for work never submitted, Dwyer writes. A Virginia law requires schools to provide score reports to families within 45 days, and to include a comparison to other students in the report. Parents will see the grade and the test score on the same report card. Finally, a number of public universities are ending test-optional college admissions.