No rhyme or Regents

New York’s high-school Regents Exams scheduled for next month have been canceled because of the surge in COVID cases, the state Education Department said Tuesday.

The move marked the second year in a row that the annual January tests were scrubbed amid a winter wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“New York set a daunting record last week with more COVID-19 cases reported in one day than ever before,” said state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa (inset).

“Once again, the January Regents Exams cannot be safely, equitably, and fairly administered across the state,” Rosa said. “We will continue to work with our schools, districts, and stakeholders to ensure they have what they need to provide academic, social and emotional, and mental health supports for our students.”

The Education Department said it would ask the state Board of Regents to modify its requirements so stu- dents set to graduate next month can still do so without passing the mandatory exams.

Before the pandemic, about 250,000 students typically took the January exams, according to the Education Department, which said it couldn’t say how many were planning to take them next month.

Last year, the Regents exams scheduled for June were also canceled because of the pandemic, and students were exempted from having to pass them to graduate.

State Health Department statistics on Tuesday showed 22,258 new cases of the coronavirus statewide, the third-highest ever, following three consecutive days of recordbreaking test results.

Education activist Mona Davids, founder of the New York City Parents Union, said she opposed canceling the exams, which she called “part of the movement to dumb down the curriculum and to remove all other objective reviews of student performance.”

Davids, a plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenges the state’s tenure laws, also suggested the teachers unions were behind the move.

“The teachers union does not want an objective measure of standards to determine whether students are learning because the results would reflect on the teachers,” she said.

State Sen. Dan Stec (R-Glens Falls), a member of the Education Committee, said the unions could “be putting their thumb on the scale and having an impact” but added, “I think this is the politics of the Democrats in the state of New York.”

Neither the city’s United Federation of Teachers nor the statewide New York State United Teachers returned requests for comment.