Copyright Baton Rouge Advocate
Long before Angelica Harris founded her own test-prep company, she was an ambitious New Orleans teen determined to attend a top university. A varsity athlete who earned straight As at a private all-girls school, Harris thought her odds were pretty good. But when she took the ACT, she earned a dismal 16 out of 36 points on the all-important college entrance exam. “My test score was really holding me back from getting into one of those top-tier Ivy League universities,” Harris said. She tried going to a popular test-prep program but felt out of place. The other students were trying to maximize their already high scores, while she, the only Black person in her class, needed more basic help. Still determined, Harris decided to create her own prep program, which focused more on filling gaps in her math, reading and writing skills than on test-taking strategies. She also worked for the first time with a Black tutor, who she found inspiring and relatable. When she retook the ACT, she doubled her score to 32, rocketing from the 20th percentile of test-takers to the 99th percentile. With her boosted score, Harris earned a full-ride scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis. While there, she decided to turn her homemade test-prep program into a business aimed at Black students who, she felt, were poorly served by existing programs. Today her company, Top Tutors for Us, provides test prep and tutoring to about 1,000 students in the St. Louis area and Louisiana, said Harris, who returned to New Orleans after college. The business partners with several schools and youth programs, including Morris Jeff Community School in New Orleans and United Way of Southeast Louisiana, which allows students to attend for free. Though all students are welcome, Top Tutors for Us specializes in pairing Black students with Black tutors. Aside from Harris' own experience, research shows students taught by those who look like them have higher grades, attendance and college enrollment rates. The Times-Picayune | The Advocate recently spoke with Harris about the story, and mission, behind her tutoring business. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Why do you think you struggled with the ACT in high school? It's actually across the board for most students who look like me. (In Louisiana, Black students' average ACT score was 16 in 2023, compared with 20 for White students.) A 20 is needed for Louisiana's TOPS scholarship. So it's really limiting for students who don't score high enough. I think one of the reasons I found is that the test is culturally biased. A lot of the questions — and in the reading section, a lot of the stories — are very Eurocentric. If you're a Black student, it's just kind of distant from your own experience. Secondly, I think a lot of Black students start late preparing for the standardized tests, whereas a lot of students who score really high start in middle school. Lastly, test prep is very expensive. It's always been inaccessible for students from low-income areas. Why didn't traditional test prep work for you? For one, it lacked individual help, like a personalized lesson plan. Secondly, the traditional programs just teach a lot of strategies. But if a student has gaps in those areas (like math or reading), those strategies don't make a whole lot of sense and aren't effective. And I think just having those large groups, and not individual help, that was a problem. Also not having someone who really could break down the test and relate it to me culturally. How does your program work? We first start off with the student taking a questionnaire. They take both a behavioral and a technical assessment. And we also have our tutors take both of those as well. We look at dozens of features between the student and tutor, and then we make a culturally competent match. From there, the student gets booked into the tutor's calendar. They meet regularly. It's virtual, so this allows the student to access their tutor anytime, anywhere. And the great thing about our program — and why schools like us versus traditional test prep — is because our program incorporates academic skill-building, plus test prep. What does it mean for tutoring to be "culturally competent?” Culturally competent means understanding where the student is coming from in terms of their backgrounds, because that all affects their learning. It's really meeting students where they are. So we match (students and tutors) based on their socioeconomic level, if they're first-generation (college students), their race and ethnicity, their passions and goals. Has the Trump administration's crackdown on diversity-related programs affected your business? Actually, this has been our biggest growth year. We've grown three times (the number of students served) this year. It's because the need is so high. The ACT reported in 2023 that scores were at a 30-year low. This is across all students, all demographics. We have all races of students in our program, but obviously the backstory behind why I founded it was to uplift minority students on these very important tests, on which they typically underperform. And demand is actually much higher now because the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in 2023, so universities can't look at race at all. So these test scores are more important to students' applications. What would you say to students who struggle with the ACT or SAT? Even though I've tutored the ACTs and SATs for eight-plus years, I'd say don't let that be a determinant of what your success will look like in the future. That said, getting a high ACT score is actually the easiest way to get scholarships. So it's just worth the time to maximize your score because you're guaranteed lots of money at the end. I really felt that once I got that higher test score, I was like, whoa, the sky's the limit for me.
