New York’s state Board of Regents is getting set to further eviscerate high-school-graduation standards.
The move, following years of watering down everything from testing requirements to the Regents Exams themselves, should be a siren alarm on how insanely state education policy gets made.
To graduate with a once-prestigious Regents Diploma, teens must now pass five Regents Exams, though “passing” now means scoring only a 65 and the board has added various loopholes.
The latest plan would create alternative pathways as soon as the 2024-2025 school year, substituting class projects or presentations for the tests.
Lowering the requirements for earning a high school diploma doesn’t help students who suffered severe learning loss during the pandemic.
It just hides the evidence.
No, claims Angelique Johnson-Dingle, deputy state education commissioner for P-12 Instructional Support: It’s about giving kids “the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and knowledge in the best way that suits them.”
In fact, it’s a cave to the teachers unions and other special interests who want the public in the dark about how badly so many public schools work, and to ideologues who pretend that failing a test doesn’t mean you haven’t learned what you should.
The Board of Regents is stacked with such credentialed ideologues, like Manhattan’s Shino Tanikawa (a bigot with a history of extremist, anti-white remarks), who believe that “equity” should supersede ensuring that all students can read, write and do math.
And like Chancellor Lester Young Jr., who told his colleagues that the goal of education shouldn’t be “completion” but rather preparing students to be successful in the next stage of life. But how to prepare them without objective measures of proficiency and competency?
Who stacked the board? Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who under the state Constitution effectively fills vacancies among the Regents.
(Technically, Regents are confirmed by a vote of the entire Legislature sitting as a committee of the whole, but Heastie’s Democratic members are a majority of the committee, and no rebels can be found on such minor-seeming matter.)
Heastie won the speakership with the support of the teachers unions, and has done their bidding on K-12 education issues ever since.
(Before that, he even occasionally supported charter schools, and he still sometimes supports excellence at the college level.)
After eight years as speaker, Heastie’s transformed the Regents into a joke — and the board, not Gov. Kathy Hochul, controls the State Education Department.
It’d be hard to make the system any less accountable to the public will.
So voters who care about education are left with no good choices.
They can try to elect a governor who’s at least willing to make a stink about it, or enough Assembly members (it’d take scores!) who’ll push Heastie to stop warring on quality education — or launch a long campaign to amend the state Constitution to allow for real accountability.
Absent some kind of political revolt, New York public education will keep spiraling downward, because that’s what the folks in charge want.
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