The State Education Department just announced that it plans to make the value of a New York high-school diploma worthless.
Parents should be up in arms.
Gone will be the need for students to pass five state Regents exams to earn a diploma.
Instead, all students will have to show nebulous “knowledge and skills” in seven areas, including “critical thinking,” “cultural competence” and “global citizenship.”
High-achievers who pass enough Regents tests won’t get distinctive diplomas — vs. the old, tested system of Regents Diplomas, Advanced Regents Diplomas and mere Local ones.
Instead, every district will have to confer the same diploma on every senior who meets utterly watered-down state requirements.
Whether they know Shakespeare from Che Guevarra, or algebraic equations from a keffiyah, every graduate gets the same participation trophy.
Meanwhile, the ill-defined “cultural competence,” “global citizenship,” etc. standards reek of thought control: SED might as well be demanding the “DEI loyalty statements” that have become all the rage in college-faculty hiring.
A New York high-school diploma, in short, will soon be worse than useless.
It won’t show any proficiency in math, science or any kind of history, but only the ability to mouth woke platitudes — proficiency in preferred pronouns and the pedagogy of “oppression.”
This is the tail-end of a drawn-out process involving a pet “Blue Ribbon Commission” engineered to recommend this nonsense, after Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie spent years stacking SED’s ultimate master, the state Board of Regents, with ideologues committed to educational nonsense.
Meanwhile, SED has adopted of the results of pandemic-induced learning loss as the new academic normal, by setting revised performance standards for lower-grade state exams based on the disastrous math and English test scores of 2022.
The only ones who benefit are the leaders of the state’s teachers unions, who no longer need worry that any of their members is at real risk of being exposed as incompetent because the kids aren’t learning anything.
Yet it’s guaranteed to accelerate the exodus from regular public-school systems, as middle-class parents turn to private schools while lower-class ones rush to whatever public charter schools the teachers unions can’t manage to kill.
Heck, it’ll be one more reason for families to flee New York entirely.
Officially, the new graduation rules aren’t final until the Regents vote them in on Nov. 1: That leaves more than four months for everyone who cares about public education in New York to flood the Board of Regents with calls and letters demanding they drop this madness.
