We are pleased to see the New York State Education Department and Board of Regents advance their proposal to decouple Regents exams from graduation requirements. For many years, AFC has advocated for multiple pathways to a high school diploma—for a system that provides students with multiple ways to demonstrate what they know and are able to do. We fully support a change that recognizes the value of multiple measures of student learning and abandons the outdated idea that all young people must pass a set of high-stakes standardized tests in order to demonstrate their readiness for post-secondary life.

New York moved towards its current graduation framework in the late 1990s based on the theory that requiring all students to pass multiple exit exams would increase access to rigorous, high-quality instruction and improve achievement for students. Unfortunately, this theory does not hold water: we now know that there is no evidence that exit exams like the Regents increase student achievement, raise the value of a high school diploma in the labor market, or convey other benefits to students who pass them. Nor are they an impartial and reliable gauge of graduation-readiness; research has found that factors as arbitrary as the weather can significantly affect a student’s performance. As the memo SED presented this morning rightly notes, “no…evidence exists to support using Regents examinations as a basis for the issuance of a high school diploma. Put simply, Regents examinations were not designed to measure graduation readiness.”

It is time for New York to follow the lead of dozens of other states and end its well-intentioned—but ultimately misguided—experiment with exit exams, which have caused significant harm to young people. Studies have found, for example, that exit exams can increase high school dropout rates, especially for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. At AFC, we have seen this harm firsthand; we have worked with students who overcame significant barriers to complete their coursework but were unable to earn a high school diploma because they struggled with standardized assessments, sometimes sitting for a single exam a half-dozen times to try to raise their score by just a few points.

We look forward to working with SED and the Board of Regents to build out the initial proposal presented today and ensure that all students, including students with disabilities and English Language Learners, get the support they need to graduate.