12.20.2022 | Public News Service | Juliet Eisenstein, senior staff attorney, Post Readiness Project, Advocates for Children of New York, described some of the options the state could consider for students to have, in lieu of Regents exams. 

“I think the most important thing is that students have access to real world opportunities, opportunities to build up real world skills, whether that be through access to work-based learning experiences, internships that they can get credit for, career and technical education classes, performance-based assessments instead of testing,” Eisenstein said.

Eisenstein noted the pandemic has provided insight into how decoupling Regents exams from graduation requirements can benefit students. 

“There’s been a lot of changes to graduation requirements during the pandemic, which, in some ways have really complicated the graduation system but also have shown that there are other ways to measure student learning and student mastery of content without high-stakes testing,” she said. 

She said new system for graduation can be created after seeing how the pandemic has altered student learning. With revising what determines a student’s readiness for graduation, Eisenstein said students will be able to demonstrate what they have learned in different ways. Read article