As New York public high schools prepare for the end of Regents exams as a graduation requirement, City Council members on Tuesday pushed for clarity on how Mayor Mamdani’s administration intends to carry out the most radical change in decades on how students earn a diploma.
The Board of Regents voted last week to authorize the New York State Education Department to move forward with a plan that will make current high school seniors the last class to have to pass the standardized tests in order to graduate. Final regulatory amendments are expected to come before the board in February.
The plan is based on a vision that all students should leave high school with at least six skills and abilities: Graduates should be academically prepared, creative, critical thinkers, effective communicators, “global citizens” and engaged in self-reflection — a concept dubbed New York’s “Portrait of a Graduate.”
That system had some members of the Council’s Committee on Education concerned at an oversight hearing about the potential to lower school standards.
“The ‘Portrait’ runs the risk of removing all rigor from our school system,” said Councilman Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx), the committee chairperson, “by doing what we so often do in the DOE: turn a well-meaning policy into a compliance checklist, and allow the DOE pressures to improve graduation rates and credit accrual at the expense of quality education.”
“The future of our school system and therefore our city rests on our ability to properly implement this directive.”
Throughout their testimony, which lasted roughly two hours, local Department of Education officials repeatedly offered examples of schools and districts across the city that already offer programs or classes seemingly aligned with the state’s forthcoming regulations.
“This could look like an eighth grader being asked to do an oral defense rather than just taking a test to demonstrate their academic knowledge, as well as effective communication and critical thinking — two of our ‘Portrait of a Graduate’ attributes,” said Danielle Giunta, the top deputy to Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels.
Officials pointed to career programs in more than one-third of all high schools, science and technology centers, and early college credit programs as ways students can demonstrate their skills other than on a standardized test.
There is also a network of more than 30 local schools, known as “consortium” schools, that have long been exempt from Regents exams. Some of those schools, including Beacon High School, are among the highest quality in the city.
Officials testified that they’ve met with every local district superintendent on the issue, who then met with the principals in their area during the spring term. The city school system is also convening a 20-member “steering committee,” working with the state to design citywide professional learning, and launching a communication strategy to families this fall.
“I’m already hearing from my office, from parents and students who don’t know what’s required of them anymore,” said Councilwoman Mercedes Narcisse (D-Brooklyn). “They sound like they’re confused.”
While Regents exams will no longer be used to assess whether a student is ready or not to graduate, the standardized tests may still serve a role in determining eligibility for seals or endorsements on a young person’s diploma — a physical sticker that recognizes mastery in a subject or learning area, such as civics or bilingualism, officials clarified.
Giunta said the city DOE is awaiting state resources and guidance, which she called an iterative process, saying, “I think there is a little ambiguity because we are watching this process evolve.”
“I just want to push back: I think there’s a lot of ambiguity,” Dinowitz said. “I don’t think there’s a ‘little’ ambiguity.”
Despite his concerns, Dinowitz — a former teacher who did not mince words when it came to his distaste for the Regents exams and criticizing their inadequacy to measure graduation readiness — voiced support for the concept of the Portrait of a Graduate. But even after hours of testimony, the lack of a scalable plan was troubling to the committee chairperson.
“There has to be some rubric or something that is standardized, so principals have a direction in which they can and should go,” he stressed, “and (so) teachers have a direction when we’re talking about something that’s going to start in a year.”
Nonetheless, local education officials said the forthcoming reforms are not just a policy imposed on them, but a vision they’re excited to carry out.
“We come before you not only as implementers of a state policy, but as genuine believers in this,” said Sharon Rencher, DOE senior executive director of state and federal education policy and planning.
“(Students) told us that the amount of time devoted to Regents exam prep during the high school years was excessive,” she added. “They arrived at the CUNY and SUNY colleges having spent years practicing passing tests — and found that college expected something very different from them.”