Regents exams have been part of New York high school education for nearly 150 years, but only in recent decades has passing them been required for every student to graduate. Beginning with the Class of 2028, that requirement goes away. Students will still sit for the state assessments federal law requires, but a score of 65 will no longer decide who graduates.
Few are mourning the change, and for good reason. New York is one of a shrinking handful of states that still tie a diploma to exit exams, despite little evidence that doing so improves students’ performance in college or the labor market. As former First Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky recently wrote for Vital City, the global history Regents forces teachers to race through centuries of material, emphasizing memorization over the critical thinking and analytical skills students need beyond high school.
What replaces the Regents
After a multi-year review, the Board of Regents is joining a growing number of states that have embraced a new framework called Portrait of a Graduate (PoG). The shift will happen in phases: the Class of 2027 is the last that must pass Regents exams to graduate, while the fully redesigned, competency-based requirements will apply to a later cohort of incoming ninth graders. Classes in between will graduate under transitional rules.
PoG starts with the right question: What do young people need to succeed after high school? The state’s answer is six domains. Every graduate should be Academically Prepared, a Creative Innovator, a Critical Thinker, an Effective Communicator, a Global Citizen, and Reflective and Future-Focused.
From a workforce readiness perspective, this shift represents a real step forward beyond measuring achievement through five passing exam scores. Three domains align directly with the career readiness competencies defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): critical thinking, communication, and career and self-development. Others connect more loosely but are no less vital for career success. Just as important, PoG creates space for new approaches to learning and new educational priorities. In a labor market where AI is reshaping entry-level white-collar work, technology fluency is not optional. Similarly, teamwork is hard to learn from a textbook. Both are best developed in real workplaces, alongside real colleagues, and while working toward real deadlines.
That is the throughline for our field. Career-connected learning is not an add-on to PoG. It is one of the main ways students will build and show the skills the PoG asks of them, and it is where PoG is thinnest on paper. Today’s ninth graders will enter a labor market shaped by AI, by shortages in care and the skilled trades, and by a higher education sector in flux.
Can the NYC Department of Education deliver?
The vision is compelling. The question is execution. Skeptics worry the change will lower standards and leave NYC students less competitive. The honest response is that standards depend on how well competencies are defined and assessed, and that work has barely begun.
On September 22, the City Council’s Committee on Education held a hearing on DOE’s readiness. Chair Eric Dinowitz, a former DOE teacher, named the fear plainly: that the process would begin with “a well-meaning policy” and end with “a compliance checklist.”
New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), represented at the hearing by First Deputy Chancellor Danielle Giunta, argued that the city is not starting from scratch. The Office of Student Pathways (OSP) runs FutureReady NYC, which is now in more than a third of high schools. CareerReady SYEP, the school-based track of the Summer Youth Employment Program, reaches more than half of the city’s high schools. OSP Executive Director Jane Martinez Dowling reported that roughly 90,000 students annually take part in work-based learning, and Brooklyn South Superintendent Michael Prayor described the partnerships that schools in his district have built with employers including Cisco and Maimonides Hospital.
But reach is not the same as quality, and right now the City cannot publicly show either one. In NYCETC’s testimony, we walked the Committee through the Fiscal 2026 Mayor’s Management Report. Every Fiscal 2026 indicator under the two goals most closely aligned with the Portrait, postsecondary enrollment and access to career-preparatory coursework, is reported as “NA.” FutureReadyNYC is credited in the report’s narrative with generating more than $30 million in student earnings since Fiscal 2022, along with better attendance and GPAs, yet it appears nowhere in the performance indicators or the spending table. The MMR measures academic preparation a dozen ways while capturing none of the other five Portrait attributes. If PoG is the City’s standard for student success, the City should measure the whole Portrait, not just one-sixth of it.
The signal to watch
At last month’s hearing, Council Member Mercedes Narcisse asked how DOE is supporting curriculum redesign. First Deputy Chancellor Giunta responded that DOE is “not bringing in a new curriculum,” pointing instead to professional learning partners focused on pedagogy and delivery.
Schools have just absorbed new citywide reading and math curricula, and no one wants another overhaul so soon. But courses designed around passing Regents exams will require more than instructional adjustments to develop creative innovators and effective communicators. Without meaningful changes to how students learn and demonstrate their skills, we risk putting a new label on the same system.
Career-connected learning can help bridge that gap, but access to those opportunities cannot depend on which school a student attends or which employers that school happens to know.
Making the promise real
The State has set the destination. The City now has to build, fund, and measure the pathways that get every student there. That is what NYCETC asked the Council to push for in September:
- Put FutureReadyNYC in the Fiscal 2027 Preliminary MMR. Track participating schools and students; offers, starts, and completions of paid work-based learning; hours worked and wages earned; credentials and college credits; and employer commitments. Disaggregate the results by borough, sector, and student subgroup.
- Publish the path to every high school. Set a clear expansion timeline, annual targets for schools and students, and one authoritative measure of reach.
- Give it a dedicated multi-year budget. Establish baseline City funding for FutureReadyNYC and report it separately from federal, State, philanthropic, and time-limited dollars, so the public can understand what sustains the program and where it is vulnerable.
- Launch Commitment 100. Just as Vision Zero rallied agencies around one measurable goal, the City should commit to connecting every young adult to a quality job, paid work experience, or career pathway, with transparent targets and shared accountability.
- Invest in the infrastructure for scale. Secure measurable employer commitments, fund a citywide intermediary strategy, and strengthen OSP so its Industry Commissions work as a real feedback loop between schools, employers, and students.
As co-chair of the Education and Human Services Commission, I am helping map career pathways and organize employer-led “Power Ups” that give students opportunities to explore careers and tackle real workplace challenges. Employers across sectors have an important role to play in creating these experiences, while NYCETC and our members can help demonstrate the skills students are developing and the value of these opportunities. We will bring that evidence to DOE, the Commissions, and the Council to help shift the focus from simply counting participation to measuring the quality and impact of career-connected learning. Making that shift will require educators, employers, and City leaders to work together, rethink familiar practices, and ensure these opportunities are available to students across the city.
The Portrait of a Graduate will not be measured by the standards New York adopts on paper, but by the opportunities students gain in practice. Delivering on that promise means ensuring every young New Yorker has the skills, experiences, and connections to succeed beyond high school.