If the Regents Is No Longer the Goalpost, What Is?

For more than 30 years, New York students have moved through high school with a very clear goalpost: the Regents exams.

Now, that is changing.

New York State is moving toward a single diploma type and away from Regents exams as a required measure for graduation. The exams are not disappearing, but the State is opening the door to multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they know and can do.

And I cannot stop thinking about the possibilities.

To me, these are not new ideas.

Multiple measures. Authentic and meaningful learning experiences. Opportunities for students to apply what they know. Performance-based assessment. Student reflection. Learning experiences that extend beyond the walls of the classroom. These and other evidence-based approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment have been researched and discussed for years.

New York State is finally moving in a direction that creates greater space for this work.

This is an amazing opportunity.

It also has the potential to be an equalizer—a true attempt at equity—but only if all of the pieces align.

Greater flexibility cannot mean different expectations for different students. It cannot mean that rigor becomes dependent upon the classroom or teacher a student happens to have. If we are going to move beyond a single assessment as the goalpost, then we have to be even clearer about what students should know and be able to do, the experiences they should have access to, how we will know they have learned it, and what supports we will provide to help them get there.

So perhaps this is the perfect opportunity for schools and districts to reflect on their philosophy.

Are we schools where we strive for testing and teach to it? Is it authentic learning with real-world experiences and applications? Is it a combination of both?

What role do we believe Regents exams should play?

If Regents exams are no longer the goalpost—the destination—then what is?

What Could This Look Like?

Take mathematics.

If we track students, as we often do in mathematics and science, is it realistic to continue teaching toward Regents exams in the lower grades simply because that has traditionally been the destination?

How might we design our mathematics pathways so that every student who is ready for Algebra in Grade 8 has the opportunity to take it, while intentionally building the skills of those who are not yet ready so that we continue to open, rather than close, access to advanced mathematics?

Can we honor the work and scores students receive throughout Grade 8 instead of using one Regents exam score as the primary indicator of their mastery and, therefore, their placement in Algebra or Geometry? Or, in some NYC schools, repeating Algebra if you don’t get a good enough grade.

Would the goal not be to have as many students as possible in the highest mathematics possible by Grade 11, potentially Calculus, so that they then have the opportunity to take an AP course in mathematics in senior year?

Yet, if we remove Regents exams as the goalpost—the destination—then how do we ensure consistency among teachers?

How do we ensure there is rigor and alignment with the New York State standards—that we are providing extensive learning experiences to ensure that our children are getting what they deserve, not what is nice to have or what this particular teacher deems as important?

If we are going to have greater freedom in determining how students demonstrate mastery, then what becomes our common measure?

What is the body of evidence that tells us—and our learners—that they have met the standards and are ready for what comes next?

And then, how bold are we willing to be?

Do we dare take the bold move and consider AP for all? Could we offer AP Human Geography in Grade 9?

As we consider pathway possibilities, how might we embed the seals, such as the Seal of Civic Readiness, into our courses of study across the humanities rather than having them exist as something additional or separate?

How can we optimize science labs and sequences to ensure that our students are competitive in the most prestigious fields of study and employment?

How do we embed science research?

How might we create a business pathway that includes an AP business course?

And how might we use the incredible resources that exist around us to make learning come alive? In New York, why wouldn’t our students use places such as the Brooklyn Museum or the American Museum of Natural History as extensions of their classrooms? How might museums, universities, businesses, community organizations, and the city itself make history, science, art, literature, mathematics, and culture come alive?

These are not extras.

These are learning experiences.

What Story Does a Learner Tell?

The movement toward a Portrait of a Graduate is paramount in all of this.

How might we capture a learner’s journey over the course of their time with us?

Imagine a learner being able to explain their journey from kindergarten or Grade 6 or Grade 9 onward.

Instead of hearing:

What if we heard:

Perhaps this becomes part of our answer to the question of what replaces the Regents as the goalpost.

Not another single assessment, but a body of evidence collected over time that tells the story of the learner—their coursework, assessments, projects, research, seals, authentic learning experiences, reflections, and demonstrations of the competencies we say matter.

What if students could actually tell the story of their own learning?

Rigor and Support Cannot Be Opposites

Of course, all of this is juxtaposed with the reality that many of our students still need support in growing their reading, writing, mathematical, and executive functioning skills.

So, while increasing and maintaining rigor, how might we train teachers in shared routines, such as Keys to Literacy comprehension and writing routines, so that students have the skills they need to continue growing as readers, writers, thinkers, and learners while also experiencing rigorous and authentic learning experiences?

Increasing rigor cannot mean removing support.

How do we provide both?

How do we ensure that a student who needs support in reading, writing, mathematics, or executive functioning is not denied access to the very experiences that might allow that student to grow as a learner?

How do we build those supports into the learning experience rather than use them as a reason to limit the learning experience?

Authentic learning cannot become an excuse for abandoning explicit instruction. Nor should the need for explicit instruction become a reason to deny children authentic learning.

We need both.

And that is why all of the pieces have to align.

And the Portrait of the learner we hope walks out our doors.

Why Couldn’t School Be This Way for Everyone?

This isn’t a new question for me.

I engaged in this kind of work at Roosevelt High School in Yonkers when we created our alternative school, and later in Mineola through our alternative-school programs.

We created different structures and experiences because some young people were finding traditional school challenging.

But my question was always:

Why is it only for kids who find school challenging?

Why couldn’t school be this way for everyone?

Why do we so often wait until a student struggles within the traditional structure before we become willing to rethink the structure?

And never has that question felt more paramount to me than it does now, watching my own children both survive and thrive in school.

There is nothing I want more than for both of them to thrive—from the time they enter school until the time they exit it.

And when they leave, I don’t want the story they carry with them to be what they were bad at, how they were bad at it, or the ways they were misunderstood or misperceived.

I don’t want 13 years of learning reduced to grades, scores, courses, and a list of the things they couldn’t do.

I want them to leave school knowing what they learned about themselves and going into the world knowing that they have possibilities—that they can make a difference for themselves and for others.

Isn’t that what we ultimately want for all of our children?

Who Wants to Lead the Way?

Perhaps the opportunity in front of us isn’t to replace the Regents with another goalpost.

Perhaps it is to reconsider the idea that there ever needed to be just one.

So, which district wants to lead the way?

Which school wants to be the one where learners are doing this work?

Which school wants its students to leave being able to demonstrate not only what they know, but how they have grown and who they are becoming?

I know I want to be the one supporting it.

Because we are at the precipice of something so great.

We have an opportunity to ask not simply what students need to graduate, but what we want them to know, what we want them to be able to do, what experiences we want them to have had, and who we hope they are becoming when they leave us.

And perhaps, finally, we have an opportunity to build school around that.

And Then I Am Left With One Final Question

What, then, is the point of the Grades 3–8 exams?

And how are they truly equitable?

We know that reading comprehension does not exist in a vacuum. What a child understands when they read is deeply connected to what they already know—their background knowledge, vocabulary, language, and experiences.

So when we place an unfamiliar passage in front of a child and use the resulting score as a measure of reading proficiency, what exactly are we measuring?

This isn’t an argument that we shouldn’t assess our youngest learners. Of course we should know how they are growing. We need to know who can decode, who is developing fluency, who needs support with language and vocabulary, who is building knowledge, who can write, who can reason mathematically, and who needs something different from us.

But is a standardized assessment the best way to give us the information we actually need to make those decisions?

If New York is finally willing to re-envision the high school experience—to consider multiple measures, authentic demonstrations of learning, and different ways for students to show what they know and can do—why can’t we ask the same questions about the years that come before it?

How they grew.

If we are finally willing to re-envision the destination, why can’t we begin with our youngest learners and re-envision the entire journey?

Why couldn’t school be this way for everyone—from the very beginning?

Thank you to my beautifully talented colleagues. It has truly been a gift to work alongside you.