ALBANY, N.Y. (September 29, 2026) — In response to renewed debate over New York State’s Regents exams and graduation requirements, the public education advocacy organization Alliance for Quality Education released the following statement from Co-Executive Directors, Marina Marcou-O’Malley and Zakiyah Shaakir-Ansari:
“For seven years, the State Education Department and Board of Regents have worked with educators and communities across New York to consider what a high school diploma should represent today. The result is a plan that keeps Regents exams in place but ends the requirement that students pass a prescribed set of them to earn a diploma, while moving toward a broader vision of what graduates should know and be able to do.
“AQE appreciates Commissioner Rosa and the Board of Regents for being willing to rethink a longstanding system instead of keeping it simply because it is familiar. New York is asking whether a graduation system built for another era still makes sense for students today. The Portrait of a Graduate, with a culturally-responsive education at its core, offers a broader vision for preparing young people for life beyond high school, and one we should be excited to strive toward.
“Reexamining graduation requirements is especially important in Black and brown communities that have faced longstanding inequities in educational opportunity and school resources. Moving away from requiring students to pass a prescribed set of Regents exams to earn a diploma can help prevent those inequities from being reinforced at graduation. In our conversations with parents across New York, keeping Regents exams as a graduation requirement is nowhere near the top of their concerns. Families are far more focused on whether students have the social and emotional supports they need and whether their schools have the resources to provide a strong public education.
“If former Governor George Pataki, whose administration fought the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit for years and argued that New York could meet its constitutional obligation to students with skills generally acquired by the eighth or ninth grade, wants to tell New York how to shape education policy today, he should expect that record to follow him. Let’s leave decisions about the future of our schools to the Regents and State Education Department, the education experts who have done the work in classrooms and communities statewide. New York’s students and communities need public schools prepared for what comes next, not graduation requirements inherited from earlier generations and kept alive merely by habit.”