I tutored both economically disadvantaged students, and students with significant learning disabilities. My experience was that the economically disadvantaged s

I tutored both economically disadvantaged students, and students with significant learning disabilities. My experience was that the economically disadvantaged students generally could make progress, if you caught them on a good day. Tutoring some of the students with learning disabilities was profoundly depressing though. Some students simply could not understand basic abstraction, like the idea that 'x' represents a number. Same with hypothetical questions. Getting shepherded through Algebra 1 won't magically grant those students abstract reasoning skills, it will just dilute the usefulness of passing the class as a metric.