New York has not exactly been churning out students with soaring academic achievement, although, somehow, despite falling achievement, graduation rates have continued to climb.
Shocking, I know. I wonder why.
For years, the state has been obsessed with incorporating DEI into its graduation standards, driven by the fact that it has educational outcomes that diverge entirely based on race. White and Asian students do well, while black, Hispanic, and other minorities do badly.
Often very badly.
What to do?
Simple: drop the standards and toss out the ones that make it look good for students who don't learn much.
During today’s meeting, some crucial questions received fuzzy answers
— Neetu Arnold (@neetu_arnold) September 14, 2026
Vice Chancellor Judith Chin asked how NY will ensure reliability of assessments: “I think many of us are questioning whether or not we as a Regents are dumbing down the assessment”
The board didn’t have a… pic.twitter.com/9JFpwyhjdk
For years, passing the Regents exam has been a graduation requirement. The move was made in the 90s as part of a push to impose standards on schools that gave "local diplomas" that evaded the necessity of kids passing the Regents exams, ensuring that all diplomas meant that students had met some basic requirements.
Though the test had been around since the 1860s to highlight high-achieving students, the move to require it for graduation came because of poor student performance. Now the Regents, driven by DEI concerns, want to drop the requirement and replace it with vague, as-yet-undefined standards that avoid academic rigor.
The assumption behind the move was made clear: some students are incapable of meeting basic standards, and we need to recognize that:
New York Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on why she thinks students shouldn’t have to take Regents exams to graduate:
— Neetu Arnold (@neetu_arnold) September 15, 2026
“You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees”
Maybe asking a student to read or do math on a test is a little more… https://t.co/vfDFZPMBfX pic.twitter.com/FV8mVDjFSa
New York Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on why she thinks students shouldn’t have to take Regents exams to graduate:
“You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees”
Maybe asking a student to read or do math on a test is a little more reasonable than asking a fish to climb a tree? 🤔
The problem they are "solving" is very clear in the statistics. White and Asian students pass at extremely high rates, while minority students other than Asians don't. Over the past decade, the state has been giving waivers of some kind or another to increase graduation rates for minorities without any increase in actual achievement, and this vote at the Board of Regents is an admission that they are just giving up the idea of making kids who do badly actually learn anything.
Sources: NYS Education Dept., New York Education Trust
The numbers are grim, and the DEI solution is to toss out the data and pat kids on the back for...existing.
Minorities, you see, are fish that can't climb trees, which is another way of saying they are incapable of reading or doing math, according to the Board of Regents. It's best to give up and just hand out the diplomas, telling them to love themselves for who they are.
Ah, the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
So, are you following all this?
— Yiatin Chu (@ycinnewyork) September 15, 2026
Kids will no longer need to pass five Regents exams, but they will need to take (though not pass) four newly created state assessments covering the same subjects as the Regents: English, math, science, and social studies.
PLUS, students must…
So, are you following all this?
Kids will no longer need to pass five Regents exams, but they will need to take (though not pass) four newly created state assessments covering the same subjects as the Regents: English, math, science, and social studies.
PLUS, students must demonstrate that they’ve acquired the six attributes of a “Portrait of a Graduate”:
1. Academically Prepared
2. A Creative Innovator
3. A Critical Thinker
4. An Effective Communicator
5. A Global Citizen
6. Reflective and Future-Focused
Local districts like NYC Public Schools are charged with coming up with ways to assess these traits (good luck). For students to develop these attributes, teachers and principals will need to first develop curricula, projects, and assignments for students to complete in grades 9–11. Oh, this is supposed to take effect in the next school year 2027-28.
No wonder advocacy group EdTrust-New York is asking to @NYSED to pause its plans entirely!
‘In a purgatory period’: NY takes next step in graduation overhaul, leaving unanswered questions
Of course, it's clearly not the case that the prior system was designed to get kids learning or prepared for life either. Those achievement scores tell us that the schools are failing badly. All this move does is declare that this is the best that can be done because some kids are too stupid to graduate High School without a rubber stamp.
Worst of all, instead of recognizing that not everybody is made to go to college, schools won't teach other life skills to ensure success. This is the 'everybody gets a trophy' solution to the fact that not everybody is doing well.
The Manhattan Institute has a great primer on the sorry state of New York's education system, where spending keeps rising, and kids' achievement rates keep dropping. It's depressing reading, of course, and yet one more confirmation that nobody in a position of authority seems to care about the kids, just the system.
The system is doing great. Lots of money. Lots of praise. Declining requirements when it comes to helping kids succeed.
Testing itself is not a solution to what ails the school system, of course. Tests are a crude, imperfect way to measure how well schools are doing, and they can be gamed. Even so, with the system easy enough to game, scores keep going down, which shows the situation is even worse than the tests suggest.
If you can't pass a test that is fairly easy to cheat on, then how badly are you doing? Schools aren't even "teaching to the test" just to look good. They have given up.
All this is being done in the name of DEI, as if that makes it OK. The cohort of graduates will indeed be more diverse, because kids who would have failed before can now graduate.
But that only means that the diplomas handed out will be worth less.
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