We’re approaching the end of an era: New York State is scrapping its storied high school Regents exams as a graduation requirement. Initially administered in the 19th century, the Regents were the first standardized state assessments of their kind. And since the early 2000s, students have had to pass five Regents in four subject areas to graduate with the standard “Regents diploma.”
Under the new plan, however, students will take Regents only for federal compliance purposes; passing won’t be required to graduate. Instead, as part of a new framework called the New York State Portrait of a Graduate, a high school diploma will be based upon students’ demonstration of six vaguely appealing “interconnected attributes”: academically prepared, creative innovator, critical thinker, effective communicator, global citizen, and reflective and future focused.
The specifics of the new graduation requirements are still in the works, but so far, official documents indicate that students will “establish their readiness” through “exhibits of evidence,” apparently the state’s hazy umbrella term for tasks including “performances, portfolios, assessments, [and] presentations.” Also, “real-world projects” and “work-based learning” may be involved. Individual teachers will design, administer, and score their students’ “exhibits of evidence” according to a statewide rubric with mastery levels, rather than letter or number grades. I’m really leaning on quotes here because, frankly, most of the guidance is too nebulous to paraphrase.
Though some other states are similarly deemphasizing traditional state testing and developing “portraits” and “visions,” New York is an outlier in its aggressive effort to overhaul its entire assessment system—and to effectively give up on clear academic expectations. As terrible as that is, it’s also more than a little troubling that the Empire State has committed to dismantling the Regents requirements without a clear sense of what will replace them.
As an English language arts (ELA) teacher in New York City in the 2010s, I certainly saw room for improvement on the ELA exam. (I’m looking at you, Part 3, with your overemphasis on “identifying the central idea.”) More broadly, I heard valid concerns around teaching to the test, inadequate support for low-performing students, and the exams’ relevance to labor market demands.
But I also saw real value in the Regents. The graduation requirement set a reasonably high bar for all students throughout the state. And while opponents contended that the exams created an inequitable barrier to graduation, EdTrust and others have rightly argued that such an argument amounts to shooting the messenger, given that the tests simply revealed schools that were failing to educate already disadvantaged students.
In fact, I taught many such students at one of New York City’s “transfer” schools, serving 16- to 21-year-olds who had left traditional high school settings. For our student population, Regents exams were indeed a substantial hurdle—one that gave us a high bar to work toward. Finishing school couldn’t just be a box-checking exercise; rather, my students knew that they had to pass the same exams as the kids at Stuyvesant. This non-negotiable standard communicated that they were still being taken seriously. That’s a powerful message for students who’ve been written off before.
Yet, it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all system. In limited circumstances, if a student with disabilities made a genuine attempt but absolutely could not pass a Regents exam, there existed a “local” diploma alternative. Conversely, students who wanted to go above and beyond could take four additional exams to earn an “advanced” Regents diploma.
Alas, Regents diplomas are now headed for the sunset. As for what’s next, current New York educators have noted that the incoming “portrait of a graduate” framework could prove either transformative or “one of the most well-intentioned failures in recent education policy,” and there’s good reason to fear it’s careening toward the latter.
Similarly flexible statewide systems have flopped before. Kentucky and Vermont both tried portfolio-based assessment in the ’90s. External reviews found administrative burdens, drains on instructional time, rampant cheating, uneven rigor, and scoring that managed to be both inconsistent and inflated. In Vermont, scoring reliability was so poor that a grader had a better chance of correctly predicting the outcome of a coin toss than agreeing with a colleague’s score. Both programs were largely abandoned by the early aughts.
Given that New York’s current plan is even fuzzier than what Kentucky and Vermont attempted, its prospects look pretty awful. The portrait-of-a-graduate bell won’t be unrung, but with three years left to go before full implementation, there’s opportunity to mitigate the risks. Here are three of the likeliest pitfalls, and what New York can do about them.
First, the portrait-of-a-graduate approach creates substantial challenges around transparency and buy-in from families. Most parents could readily understand what it meant for a kid to earn a 75 on the Algebra I Regents. But the same can’t be said for a “proficient” rating for “global citizen.”
New York needs to develop a robust and realistic family engagement plan (including support for educators, who will simultaneously be expected to learn the ropes and explain it all to students and families). Where did the number grade go? What’s an interconnected attribute? Why should families care about abstract concepts like “reflective and future focused”? And, even if they’ve been persuaded, how can they support students who need extra help? If a student isn’t cutting it as a “creative innovator,” families aren’t going to intuit the most effective interventions.
The burden of adapting to this new system will be even greater for families already facing disadvantages, such as immigrant families navigating language barriers and unfamiliar institutions. New York must take that seriously.
Second, the portrait-of-a-graduate rollout and implementation are going to pose significant logistical difficulties. Plans are taking shape to have educators participate in a handful of virtual and regional in-person training sessions. But that’s barely more than the usual back-to-school PD. With the new framework, teachers will have to internalize a radically revised assessment system and rubrics. They will have to rewrite entire courses and design tasks aligned to the new state guidance. Performance-based assessments can take many hours to execute. Administrators will have to ensure that the six interconnected attributes build on one another across subjects and grade levels. They’ll have to develop new infrastructure for tracking students’ evidence of learning. And that’s all while maintaining the normal instructional load amidst staffing shortages and chronically low morale.
Maybe these “growing pains” will be worth it in the long run, but New York can’t afford to underestimate them. The state should provide exemplar “exhibits of evidence,” along with the lessons and materials required to get students there, so that teachers aren’t forced to start from scratch. New York also ought to establish protected, compensated planning time dedicated specifically to portrait work, rather than compelling teachers to be stretched even thinner during their existing prep periods. And a state-funded, standardized digital platform would ease the administrative burden around creating and maintaining portrait-of-a-graduate student records. Plus, when students move, everyone will benefit if their evidence moves seamlessly with them—not across disparate systems cobbled together by different districts.
The most serious challenge emerging from the new framework, however, will be maintaining rigorous, consistent baseline expectations for all students. Research shows that higher expectations translate into more student learning. But when “exhibits of evidence” are to be designed, administered, and scored by the students’ own teachers, there’s little incentive to hold students to high expectations. In fact, incentives point in the opposite direction: Teachers typically want their students to graduate, and they want themselves and their schools to earn good ratings.
The official language around the portrait-of-a-graduate framework already implicitly encourages “leveled” assessments, celebrating the flexibility to adapt to “local context, community priorities, and district readiness” (emphasis mine). But such flexibility invites lowered expectations and poses tremendous equity risks. First, disadvantaged students are already more likely to receive assignments that aren’t challenging enough. What’s more, if New York lacks a consistent measure of student performance, then there is no way for the state to know which students are being underserved. Rather than revealing where students need more resources, an inconsistent assessment system will conceal those needs. In a state with huge disparities in district size, capacity, and prosperity, this is a systemic disservice.
The current guidance describes a plan for calibration, such that teachers across schools will be trained to score “exhibits of evidence” comparably. Despite the common rubric, I’m skeptical that it’s possible to ensure comparable scoring of entirely different tasks, but even in the best-case scenario, calibration isn’t enough to combat the powerful, systemic incentives to pass one’s own students.
When possible, “exhibits of evidence” should be scored blindly or by external graders to maximize objectivity. New York should also consider developing a handful of statewide anchor tasks; schools could be required to choose a small number of tasks from a limited menu, which would boost consistency while allowing flexibility for the remaining “exhibits.” These tasks could still include end-of-course exams; Massachusetts, for example, has proposed a “portrait of a learner” model that still includes end-of-course testing, with equity as a stated rationale. And accountability matters: Both the “exhibits” and the scoring should be subject to auditing, and data should be publicly reported.
New York is set on its highly questionable course. But realizing the promise of the new portrait-of-a-graduate framework—that every student will be prepared for what comes next—will depend on whether the state builds a system that’s consistent and rigorous, or settles for one that clings to abstract ideals. There’s still time to shape the plan so that New York doesn’t become another cautionary tale.
