Chris Cerf was Superintendent of Newark Public Schools and New Jersey’s Commissioner of Education. In the latter roll he oversaw 2,500 public schools, 1.4 million students, and 110,000 teachers in over 600 school districts. He serves on the board of ExcelinEd, a national nonprofit focused on state-based education policy.

New York education officials recently unveiled a plan to eliminate the state’s highly respected Regents Exams, a longstanding requirement to earn a fully recognized high school diploma. Lawmakers in New Jersey are considering a last-ditch effort to eliminate the state’s graduation exit exam in their lame-duck session ending in mid-January. 

The trend is evident across the country as more and more states essentially have no objective measure for graduation eligibility other than course completion, which is notoriously meaningless given rampant grade inflation, and other highly manipulable “soft” criteria.

As a former state education chief and urban superintendent, I strongly oppose these changes. They will lower the bar for students, make it harder for them to succeed beyond high school, and undermine what should be our shared national commitment to assure equitable educational opportunity for all students regardless of zip code or demographics. 

The Regents Exams have been a cornerstone of New York’s educational framework for more than a century, serving as a benchmark to gauge students’ mastery of essential subjects. To graduate, most students earn 22 credits and pass five Regents exams in subjects such as English, math and social studies.

The New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment measures whether students are prepared to graduate based on their knowledge in grade 10 of English language arts, Algebra 1 and Geometry. The test is the primary pathway for graduation.

The decision to eliminate these exams appears to stem from a desire to reduce inequity and promote a more “holistic” understanding of students’ capabilities. “Holistic” or “whole child” are words that accountability opponents ritually invoke as an alternative to making sure every child can read and do math, the proven building blocks of a successful post-graduation life. In reality, transitioning highly regarded measures of student proficiency from mandatory to optional—or eliminating them altogether—will undermine the ability to maintain rigorous academic standards and ensure all students are adequately prepared for the challenges they will face after high school. 

Supporters of lowering expectations solemnly intone “equality” as their goal, often with thinly veiled suggestions that their views are animated by the pursuit of racial justice. Exactly the opposite is true. Eliminating a level playing field on which all students are held to the same high standard is the very definition of inequity. The only thing that reducing graduation criteria equalizes is lack of educational opportunity. 

Moreover, instead of being able to identify and support those who need help reaching proficiency, we won’t even know who they are. They’ll simply sidestep a standardized assessment that would identify those gaps to obtain a diluted diploma that means little in the real world. The absence of a uniform metric to assess students’ performance across different schools and districts all but guarantees lower expectations for students who historically have been grossly underserved by our public education system.

These efforts to lower standards and dismantle meaningful accountability come at a time of truly alarming declines in student achievement. Recently released international math results (the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA) show that American teenagers are performing considerably worse than 20 years ago and that scores have been sharply declining since 2018. 

Similarly, In June 2023, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) released Long-Term Trend Assessment results showing average scores for 13-year-olds declined four points in reading and nine points in math compared to assessments administered in 2020. Compared to assessments a decade ago, scores slid even further.  

These are not trivial changes. Rather, they are of a magnitude that economists have shown will materially reduce lifetime earnings and, in the aggregate, national prosperity. They likely also will lead to increased economic stratification of society and the attendant political and social unrest that often accompanies it.

These results call for rigor, high expectations for all, and systematic remediation for those who fall short of meeting them. As research consistently proves–and as every good teacher knows in his or her bones–when we expect more from students, we get more from students. When we water down expectations, offering instead a panoply of alternative ways to obtain a diploma, that piece of paper loses much of its value. High schools will no longer be able to say credibly that their graduates are career or college-ready—and an alarming number will not be. 

Giving students early feedback that they are not on track academically might be uncomfortable. But discomfort is better than the cruelty of launching a child into adulthood unprepared for success in life. 

Unfortunately, some New York and New Jersey officials think otherwise. Egged on by unions who for decades have resisted accountability in virtually any form and by some “progressives” who cherish the equality of universally low standards over high expectations for all, their goal is to replace  objective, equitable measures  with a hodge-podge of ways to graduate from high school without any meaningful demonstration of competency.   

Let’s hope that common sense–-and a genuine commitment to educational equity–-prevail.

(Photo courtesy of Chris Cerf.)