🚨🎓 BREAKING: A VICTORY FOR NEW YORK STUDENTS! Today, the New York State Board of Regents took a major step toward ending the requirement that students pass a prescribed number of Regents exams to graduate from high school. As a former high school math teacher and Ranking Member of the Assembly Education Committee, I strongly support this change. For too long, New York embraced a one-size-fits-all, high-stakes testing system. We constantly moved the goalposts and “built the plane while we were flying it.” The result was a teach-to-the-test culture that did not deliver the improvements in literacy and numeracy we were promised. When I was teaching, I saw 11th and 12th graders who struggled to pass Algebra but were phenomenal students in other ways. Some had tremendous mechanical ability or wanted to learn a trade, yet they were being robbed of opportunities to pursue Career and Technical Education programs where they could discover their talents and succeed. That never made sense to me. Critics will say this is lowering standards. It isn’t. Before Regents exams became an exit requirement for virtually every student, New York had multiple pathways to graduation. Regents exams aren’t going away, and students will still be able to demonstrate advanced academic achievement. There are many ways to demonstrate mastery. Some students excel on traditional exams. Others understand the material but simply aren’t good test takers. A bubble sheet should not determine a young person’s future. There’s an old saying: If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its life believing it is stupid. We shouldn’t do that to our children. This is another important step toward finally ending the failed educational experiment era and returning to proven approaches like the Science of Reading, back-to-basics math, CTE and teaching the whole child. We’re not lowering the bar. We’re recognizing there is more than one way to reach it. This is a victory for students, parents, teachers and common sense.