On June 15, the New York State Board of Regents and the State Education Department announced what they called a “first-in-the-nation” transformation of the high school diploma. Beginning with students entering high school in September 2027, New York will no longer require passing Regents exams to graduate. Instead, the state will award diplomas based on “demonstrated readiness”—showing that students have met statewide competencies such as critical thinking and communication, though the state has not yet said what evidence will count toward this goal.
The Regents exam requirement was far from perfect. Over the years, the state created various routes through which students could graduate with less than a passing score on the exam. Individual schools allegedly engaged in “score scrubbing,” looking for those few points in an essay or long-form response that some students needed to meet the lowered threshold. Perhaps relatedly, graduation rates in New York City reached an all-time high of 81.4 percent in 2022.
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But ending the Regents requirement doesn’t answer the key question for a college admissions officer or employer: What does a New York State high school diploma tell us about a student’s knowledge and capabilities? None of the reforms that the state has announced so far will supply that information.
The state’s answer, so far, is “multiple pathways,” which “recognize students’ interests in the Arts; Career and Technical Education (CTE); Career Development and Occupational Studies (CDOS); Civics; Humanities; Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); and World Languages.” The state has not yet specified what a student must do to complete one of these pathways. The rubrics meant to define proficiency are supposed to materialize in time for the 2026–27 school year, according to the department’s implementation timeline.
But New York doesn’t have to look far to come up with guidelines for a rigorous performance-based system—it has been running such a system for 25 years.
Since the late 1990s, the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a group of 38 public high schools mostly in New York City, has utilized a state waiver to graduate students without taking most Regents exams. In place of the exams, students complete four assessment tasks rooted in the core academic disciplines—an analytic literary essay, a social studies research paper, a student-designed science experiment, and a piece of higher-level mathematical reasoning. Each involves a written component and an oral defense before a panel of teachers and outside experts, making these assessments resemble a graduate school thesis defense more than a standardized test.
Every school in the consortium gives the same assignments and grades them against the same rubrics. Teachers keep anchor papers—student work marked at each level—so that they know what passing essays look like. They don’t grade the tasks in isolation. Each teacher scores a task separately and then compares his score against those of the other teachers. Outside assessors review the results. And Consortium students must still pass the English Language Arts Regents, which serves as an anchor.
The consortium’s requirements demonstrate what a real performance-based system requires: years of diligence, training, and structure to make standards mean the same thing in every building. New York State has not yet shown how it plans to do any of this.
A graduation standard by itself does nothing. It only means something when teachers have reference papers against which to score submissions, compare their scores with peers, and have their scoring checked by someone outside the school building. Qualities such as “critical thinker” or “effective communicator” mean little until the state identifies the academic tasks through which a student must demonstrate it.
Even a well-built system would not let the diploma alone carry the standard, however. The public needs other ways to judge whether a school is doing its job. The state collects relevant data but rarely analyzes it thoroughly. It compiles results in English and math for third through eighth grade. It tracks who sits for the Regents exams, soon to be optional, and how those students perform. It has college-enrollment and completion figures, too. What the state almost never reports, though, is cost—how much a district spends over 13 years to bring a student from kindergarten to a high school diploma.
New York has shared its vision for revised graduation pathways, but most of the hard work remains to be done. As it implements these new performance-based standards, the New York State Education Department should commit itself to a rigorous, independent, data-based assessment of the quality of each school and district. That will help ensure that students are ready for the world beyond high school graduation.