Regents push to make a NY high-school diploma worthless

Opinion

editorial

By Post Editorial Board

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 graduate really does know 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-size-fits-all approach fails to recognize and nurture these differences,” puffs Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.

In other words, 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 governor), who in turn are (under a fluke of the state Constitution) effectively picked by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx).

And Heastie is an honest politician: He stays bought, and he became speaker only by winning the support of the state’s teachers unions — which oppose standards of all kinds because they make it easier for parents to realize their children aren’t learning what they need to, and so threaten to make teachers’ jobs harder, and potentially even get bad teachers fired.

Rosa and the Regents bathe their war on actual education in noise about their “commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion,” the need for a “Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework” and the supposed perils of “high-stakes” testing — wrapping in progressive blather their refusal to insist on effective pedagogy.

And so the commission’s report calls for multiple pathways to a single HS diploma (with the options of seals/endorsements for outstanding students); assessment flexibility (i.e., sliding-scale grading); “meaningful life-ready credentials” (translation: 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 learning, achievement and college-readiness 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 cover up the damning evidence of learning loss during the COVID-inspired school closures.

Now they’re prepping to keep the form while killing the substance of a Regents Diploma.

In a further sign that the “Blue Ribbon” folks, the Regents, Rosa and the unions are all on the same team (and not the kids’ team), Melinda Person, the new boss of New York State United Teachers, in a September op-ed touted her union’s “engagement” with the Blue Ribbon Commission — cheering her sock puppet.

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.