Killing Public Education
Make no mistake: The state Board of Regents is indeed moving to kill New York’s gold-standard “Regents Diploma” — once a guarantee that a high-school grad truly knows his or her stuff. Officially, the board is now just mulling the recommendations of its Blue Ribbon Commission on Graduation Measures to “update” grad requirements — but those ideas are all about watering down standards.
And the Regents and the State Education Department stacked the “expert” panel to get that “advice.”
As ever, the dumbing-down is packaged in honeyed words: “Every student has unique talents, skills and interests, and a one-sizefits-all approach fails to recognize and nurture these differences,” puffs Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.
That is: There’s no basic knowledge every kid should learn. (Not that Rosa and the Regents are doing anything to get kids with those “unique skills” any real help, either.)
Rosa, for the record, is chosen by the Regents (not the gov), who in turn are (under a fluke of the state Constitution) effectively picked by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.
And Heastie is an honest politician: He stays bought, and he became speaker only with the support of the teachers unions — which oppose standards of all kinds because they make it easier for parents to realize their kids aren’t learning what they need to, and so threaten to make teachers’ jobs harder, and even get bad teachers fired.
The commission’s report calls for multiple pathways to a single HS diploma (maybe with added baubles for top students); assessment flexibility (i.e., sliding-scale grading); “meaningful life-ready credentials” (that is, proficiency in PayPal, not math) and “culturally responsive curriculum, instruction and assessment” — as if there’s distinctive black or Hispanic ways to learn.
The Regents exams serve as New York state’s only reliable barometer of student achievement at the high-school level; Rosa & Co. have already been undermining them by, e.g., last year lowering the passing score from 65 to 50 to conceal learning loss during the COVID-inspired school closures.
Now they’re prepping to keep the form but kill the substance of a Regents Diploma.
The sound you hear is thousands of New York families packing their bags to leave the Empire State for places whose leaders value excellence in education.
You can’t fool all the people all the time.