New York will let students earn a high school diploma without passing Regents exams, under proposals described this week by state education officials, reports Julian Shin-Berro on Chalkbeat.
"Instead, they will have a menu of options to choose from to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in seven key areas: critical thinking, effective communication, cultural and social-emotional competences, innovative problem solving, literacy across content areas, and a status as a 'global citizen'.”
Students may show their proficiency in various ways, education officials said. For example, "students could demonstrate their communication skills" by "obtaining a seal of biliteracy, taking an English composition course, working a summer internship at a community newspaper, passing a state English exam, and completing a digital media career and technical education program."
New York is moving to the “portrait of a graduate” model that's proving popular across the country, reports Libby Stanford in Education Week. Seventeen states and numerous school districts have adopted "portraits" or "profiles" that describe the ideal graduate.
"It can be easy to say students should think critically, but measuring such a skill is much harder," writes Stanford.
I wonder how young New Yorkers will prove their social-emotional competence? Many teenagers are kind of a mess: Will they be denied a diploma? If they can't pass a geography test, how do they show global citizenship? And while they're supposed to be literate, the "portrait" doesn't mention any level of math, science or history knowledge.
Recent immigrants struggle to pass the English Language Regents exam, writes Sunisa Nuonsy, a Lao-American teacher and researcher in New York City. During the pandemic, when graduation requirements were eased, project-based learning let her 12th-graders excel.
I predict that all the students who can't pass exams will do projects instead. The criteria for passing will be very, very fuzzy. Teachers will be under heavy pressure to pass everyone along, even if "effective communication" comes down to "knows how to use emojis."
In 1878, New York began using Regents exams to test whether high school students had learned anything, writes Kathleen Moore in the Times-Union. In the era when fewer students attended high school, the questions were a lot harder. (Here are 10 Regents questions from 1893 to 1967.)
In the 1894 Regents exam on Homer’s "Iliad," students had to translate four stanzas of the epic poem into English, outline the entire plot and explain why certain Greek words were used.
The 1893 Regents exam in astronomy asked students to calculate the zenith distance of the sun at noon on June 21.
The 1907 ancient history exam directed students to draw a map of the Mediterranean Sea and its surroundings, including “10 cities that became centers of political or commercial power from 1000 B.C. to 400 A.D.”
The 1935 Regents exam in architecture required students to "design a library in classic style, using the Roman Doric order."