New York teachers question Regents exams

Last month in Albany, Board of Regents Chancellor Betty A. Rosa announced that, in the fall, she would assemble a commission to evaluate the possibility of dropping the Regents Examinations as a graduation requirement for high schoolers in New York State.

New York remains one of 12 states that require students in public high schools to pass standardized exit exams in order to earn their diplomas. This number has dwindled from 25 in 2012, owing to scholars’, activists’, and legislators’ contentions that the tests lower graduation rates without offering measurable benefits or accurately predicting college success.

Implemented in 1878, the Regents Examinations represent the nation’s oldest statewide system of standardized testing and possibly its most rigorous and most extensive, currently comprising 10 exams, of which students must pass five before graduation. While readymade, nationally available tests like PARCC and Smarter Balanced passed into and out of fashion among other states during the No Child Left Behind era, New York held fast to its own longstanding program, albeit with Common Core updates. Apart from occasional parental rebellions, the Regents hadn’t seen a major challenge in decades before now.

That doesn’t mean that all teachers have always liked them. Because the exams tie directly into required classes in New York high schools like US History and Algebra I, they can play a considerable role in determining the day-to-day activities in the classrooms of the instructors who administer those courses. As the national debate over the merits of standardized testing continues to roil, local teachers have expressed frustrations about the Regents, criticizing the exams for their content, format, and inflated role in public education.

Jared Goldsmith teaches algebra at Discovery High School in the Bronx and has come to see the Regents, at times, as a one-size-fits-all solution that constrains his ability to reach a diverse student population. “An issue we run into a lot is that the tests are not at an appropriate level for our students,” he explained. “At a certain point, I want to teach them where they’re at. I feel like that would be most beneficial for them. If you’re at a sixth-grade or seventh-grade math level, but you’re in ninth grade, I kind of want to start where you are and build you up from there.”

The relatively high benchmark set by the Regents exam, however, forces Goldsmith to fast-track his students’ progress, sometimes leading him to find shortcuts around the core problem of their innumeracy instead of using classroom time to help them with elementary arithmetic or basic concepts like fractions, which some freshmen don’t comprehend. “To be a citizen of the world, it helps to have an understanding of how fractions work and what they represent,” he said. “But to pass this exam, you don’t really have to know what a fraction is. You just have to know how to type it into the calculator.”

Goldsmith clarified that he doesn’t “explicitly teach to the test, where the questions we do in class are exact test questions, until the end of the year,” but he teaches “with the test in mind the entire year. There’s even a website for math that collects all the Regents problems that have been given based on topic, so if I’m about to teach a certain topic, I’ll go online and see what types of questions have been asked.” The database influences his lesson plan, steering him toward material that generally reflects the test-makers’ priorities and away from the sorts of problems that he can “maybe leave out or deemphasize because they don’t show up on the test as much.”

The administration at Discovery High School “cares a lot about Regents,” Goldsmith said. “I know in New York City, it’s definitely a major factor in your school’s reputation and your school’s standing.” He’s never seen a teacher get in trouble on account of their students’ Regents scores, but he still feels “some indirect pressure. I want my Regents scores to be as high as other teachers’ Regents scores, even though I know there are so many other things: that I have these positive relationships with my students, that I saw them grow, that they became better people. At the end of the day, I definitely put some value on the Regents scores.”

Goldsmith’s colleague at Discovery, history teacher Molly Willner, emphasized the tension on both sides of the classroom: “There’s a lot of anxiety for both teachers and students around the Regents exams. Especially among freshmen and sophomores who might be first-time test-takers for the Regents exams, it’s definitely a stressful experience.”

The Regents’ status as a graduation requirement forces students to take them (and their corresponding courses) seriously, but Goldsmith noted that this can bear the unintended consequence of leading kids to devalue classes where they don’t necessarily have to worry about passing a Regents exam afterward. As Goldsmith sees it, one “can’t really blame them” for reducing their level of effort in some cases: for struggling students, it makes sense to put first things first.

Willner voiced concerns regarding the content of the Regents exams. “It was my first time teaching US History this year, and I thought it was really important to do the first unit on indigenous populations, pre-Columbian and pre-colonization,” she recounted. “And that’s not privileged on the Regents exam, so that put the pedal to the metal toward the end of the year to make sure we covered content later in history that is privileged on the exam.”

Willner also teaches Global History, which she considers a misnomer within the Regents curriculum. “The way that the test is written, the majority of what is tested is on European history,” she lamented.

Sometimes, the Regents exams’ presentation of historical concepts conflicts with the way she’d like her students to understand them. She recalled, on the test, a document-based question “on the ways in which imperialism was a positive for imperialist nations, and I think that definitely was not the correct way to frame that issue.”

Mary DiNapoli, an English teacher from Upstate New York at Cazenovia High School, observed that the ELA (English Language Arts) exam favors “argumentative writing, and while I appreciate the rhetorical skills evaluated in this portion, I really wish that the [New York State Education Department] would develop assessments of media literacy, or teaching students how to evaluate the truth and reliability of a source. This seems to be one of the most important skills that students are lacking, and now more than ever, it’s critical. My guess, though, is that a focus on media literacy would be deemed ‘too political.’”

For Providence Ryan, a science teacher who has worked for the New York City Department of Education for three years, the Regents curriculum has occasionally restricted her ability to engage her students’ natural curiosities. “A part of the Living Environment curriculum is about homeostasis in the human body and human body systems, and it is a very, very small part of the curriculum,” she described. “Homeostasis is an extremely important part of the curriculum, but the specific body systems themselves play a very minimal role. But that is the content that my kids are extremely interested in every year. So it creates this weird thing where I want to spend all this time on this content that the kids are extremely interested in, but also I know there’s other content that we need to get through before the end of the school year.”

Goldsmith pointed out the additional problem of cultural bias on the exams: “I know that last year on the algebra exam there was a question about bicycles and tricycles, and it was necessary to know for the problem that a bicycle has two wheels and a tricycle has three wheels, which seems completely obvious, but really, I have some students who have not been in the country and speaking English very long, and they should be able to succeed on a math test without knowing that the prefix bi in English means two.”

For five of the 10 Regents exams, the Education Department offers translated versions in Spanish, Russian, Korean, Haitian Creole, and Chinese, but about 20 percent of English-language learners (ELLs) in New York City speak languages other than these. According to Goldsmith, most ELLs “will have both versions of the test” – original and translated – “in front of them. But my instruction is in English. When they learn a new math word, like quadratic formula, they’re learning that word in English.” For this reason, many ELLs prefer to use the English tests in spite of the challenges.

Ryan also underlined the importance of English language skills across the Regents exams: “For the Biology Regents, a huge part of the test is just reading comprehension. You can do really, really well on that test if you’re a strong reader, regardless of how much content knowledge you have, and that poses a problem for students like the population I’ve worked with [in the Bronx], where they maybe really understand the content and can explain it to you backward and forward and upside-down, but maybe they’re coming into school with a lower-grade reading level.”

Ryan continued, “I think the problem is that different kids need to be assessed in different ways. So I often think about whether there are ways to standardize the content and the skills that we’re testing the students on without necessarily standardizing the format in which they’re tested on them.”

Willner echoed the sentiment: “My dream would be that the Regents would be not a test but kind of a guideline,” wherein the state would specify “the major topics that you should think about including in the scope and sequence of your curriculum” and then allow each teacher “to come up with some kind of assessment” to showcase their students’ mastery of those topics.

“Students across the state would have the same content that they’re interacting with but then would have the individualized approach of teachers who are in the classroom every day and know what’s best for their students, what’s interesting for their students, and then would be able to use their own research and best practices to demonstrate their students’ knowledge,” Willner pictured.

To this end, Ryan suggested “a project-based learning assessment, or something like portfolios at the end of the year, which may be a better alternative that’s able to be differentiated to meet students’ needs while also pushing students to achieve high standards.”

Goldsmith maintained the importance of “accountability.” In order to preserve state oversight, a system of the kind imagined by Willner might require the Education Department to evaluate and approve each teacher’s method for making sure their students meet the Regents standards, instead of simply mass-distributing a single test for each course. “I feel like right now there’s a board that constructs these Regents exams, so I wonder if that workforce could be repurposed,” Willner mused.

1972 was the last time New York State openly considered leaving behind the Board of Regents’ standardized system of compulsory end-of-course exams. A task force appointed by the State Education Commissioner found, per the New York Times, that “in many classrooms success on the Regents examinations becomes the overriding concern of students and teachers and ‘creates an atmosphere which can only harm the teaching‐learning process.’”

A few months later, the board officially rejected the task force’s recommendations despite the outspoken anti-Regents attitude of member Dr. Stephen K. Bailey, who in the Times opined that the exams had “helped to impose unimaginative, standardized curricula upon massively bored teenagers.” Bailey, an educator, came up against fellow board member Theodore M. Black, a “Long Island publishing executive” who believed that canceling the Regents would be a capitulation to “the Age of the Slob” – a time of “slovenliness in personal hygiene,” of “immorality and obscenity publicly flaunted,” and of “a slothful, disinterested shoddiness in the performance of one’s tasks.”

Supporters of state-issued mandatory exit exams in high schools tend to view them as a means to ensure that schools hold all students – from rich and poor districts, white and black ones – to the same rigorous standard, thereby promoting equality. But in New York, private schools have no obligation to present the Regents Examinations to their students, who can graduate without them.

Many private schools choose to use the Regents anyway, but others, like Basis Independent Brooklyn in Red Hook, maintain that their own standards surpass those of the Regents. Some might argue that, in exempting private schools, the Board of Regents has made a class distinction in determining that wealthier kids don’t require the same level of monitoring by the state as low-income students in public schools.

“While it feels unfair and unjustified, it unfortunately doesn’t feel surprising to me,” Ryan reflected. “There are kids who maybe struggle socioeconomically; they have a historically marginalized racial and ethnic background, and they’re being subjected to standardized testing that wealthy private schools get to opt out of.”

In the public school system, the New York Performance Standards Consortium has since 1997 offered hope to some teachers who envision a world without standardized testing. The Education Department has granted a waiver to the 38 constituent schools (all but two in New York City), allowing the Consortium to develop a common system of flexible performance assessments in place of the Regents exams.

The exemption doesn’t extend to the Regents ELA exam, which students still have to take, but otherwise teachers evaluate them based on projects, essays, and presentations. They still earn the Regents Diploma, and college acceptance rates significantly exceed those of standard New York schools.

Still, for many New Yorkers, school life without the Regents may be unimaginable. For Goldsmith, who believes that the Regents exams should at least be “changed or deemphasized” (possibly with more “alternative paths to graduation”), the test brings back memories of his own high school experience in suburban Albany.

“When I took Algebra I, toward the end of the year we got a book with all the old Regents exams in it, and each day our homework would be to do another ten questions from the practice Regents exam. It’s been all Regents all the time since I’ve been in ninth grade and now as a teacher,” he said. “For me, I see it kind of as a necessary evil because I can’t really conceive of any education system where you don’t have the Regents exam. . . . I just don’t know anything different.”