New York Wants To Scrap Testing Requirements While School Spending Soars

This week, the state's educational leaders moved to eliminate Regents exam requirements for high school students.

As colleges across the country are reinstating standardized tests, New York high schools are taking another approach: eliminating the state's longstanding Regents exam requirements.

This week, the New York Board of Regents, which oversees the state's public schools, voted to make the standardized exams optional going forward. They are currently required for most high schoolers to graduate. The move, intended to "eliminate barriers to graduation for some students," represents "New York's most substantial education policy overhaul in decades," reported The New York Times.

"Advancing this work moves us closer to a more equitable system, one that upholds high expectations for all while ensuring that a student's zip code, background, or circumstance never determines their opportunities for success," said Regents Chancellor Lester W. Young Jr.

This week's vote did not officially end the Regents exam requirements; it gave the state's education department approval to draft the new requirements, according to Chalkbeat New York. The Board of Regents will vote on the final changes in June. If the changes go into effect, New York public school students would still have to take federally required tests in English, math, and science, plus a state-required social studies exam, according to Albany's ABC affiliate.

According to the Times, students in the future could still opt to take the Regents exams to graduate, or they could take other assessments. But those other pathways to graduation "are not yet clear and are likely to take different shapes from one school district to the next," and "schools would be in charge of designing their own assessments," which could "include classroom assessments, teacher observations or work by students in internships, for instance."

Critics have already noted that eliminating the Regents exam requirements may decrease academic rigor and standards without offering solutions to improve student outcomes.

Manhattan Institute fellows Ray Domanico and Jennifer Weber have acknowledged that the Regents exams are "far from perfect" for measuring students' readiness to graduate, as students have used several workarounds to pass the tests with subpar scores. But Domanico and Weber have argued that the proposed alternatives to graduation requirements offer little insight about student performance.

"There has to be a meaningful way to determine if students are meeting expectations," Domanico told the New York Post on Monday.

The move even drew criticism from Micah Lasher (D–Manhattan), the New York State Assembly member who is expected to fill Rep. Jerry Nadler's (D–N.Y.) congressional seat.

"In the absence of any coherent strategy by the State Education Department to meaningfully improve K-12 education, it is hard to see this as anything other than a means to paper over that absence," Lasher wrote on X on Tuesday.

Sunsetting the Regents requirements is just one component of a larger educational roadmap proposed by the state's education department. The roadmap, called the NY Inspires plan, aims to "transform" public education in the state by 2029.

"Rather than perpetuating antiquated systems based on credits and GPAs, New York will move to a competency-based system that allows students to demonstrate readiness in multiple ways, at their own pace," promises one NY Inspires presentation that was given to the Board of Regents in June.

The state has already adopted one NY Inspires policy called the "Portrait of a Graduate" educational framework for students. The framework aims to provide "opportunities for enhanced critical thinking and problem-solving skills" while placing "culturally responsive-sustaining education at the center" of the student experience.

According to the state's education department, "NY Inspires began in 2019 when Dr. Betty A. Rosa, then-Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, wrote a column imploring New Yorkers to rethink and reimagine our education system, as the current one was leaving too many students behind." The column was entitled, "It's time that we rethink the high school diploma."

Amid these changes, two things remain constant for New York's public schools: increased spending and mediocre results. According to the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan watchdog organization, New York spent 91 percent above the national average per student for elementary and secondary education in the 2021–2022 school year. This upcoming school year, New York state is expected to spend $39 billion in school aid, a $1.7 billion increase from last year. Meanwhile, "student performance in New York is middle-of-the-pack nationally and lower than neighboring states that spend less," the CBC reported. In short, the CBC wrote, "more money has not been the cure-all."

Time will tell whether slashing standards and performance metrics is a cure-all. Unfortunately for the state's taxpayers and the students, New York's Regents seem convinced it will be.