New York Said Go. It Already Knows How.

On November 9 the New York Board of Regents heard an hour-long presentation on federal testing rules. When it was over, the state's plan for a new diploma had stopped being a maybe.

Here is what had been unsettled. In September the Board directed the Education Department to take the steps to end the Regents exams as a diploma requirement, starting with students who graduate in January 2028. But a federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, requires every state to test its high school students in English, math, and science and to use the results when it rates its schools. New York uses the Regents exams to meet that law. Until the state said how the two fit together, a district had good reason to wait and see.

The presentation said how. Students will still sit the Regents exams, because ESSA requires the testing. ESSA does not require a student to pass. That rule was New York's own, so New York can remove it. The federal rule could have been a reason to pause. The Board kept the plan and changed the exam's job. Regent Shino Tanikawa put it plainly at the meeting: the exams used to have two purposes, and the state got rid of one. The score will go on rating the school, and it will stop deciding who graduates.

With that settled, the plan has a date on it: the first students it covers are juniors today. I have watched the change reach the districts. Until this month the superintendents I talk with treated the new diploma as something to watch. Now they treat it as something to do. I think the Regents made the right decision, and it was a big one for the state where the country's first statewide exams were given, in 1865. Most states do not make a diploma depend on a test.

The decision changes who has a stake in the score. Schools will still be rated on the results, and each has to test at least 95 percent of its students. New York families have refused state tests before: in 2015 about one in five students in grades three through eight did. Whether a teacher is rated on the results is decided district by district. State law does not require any state test in a teacher's evaluation, and under a 2024 law every district will bargain a new evaluation plan with its teachers' union by June 2032, with or without test results in it. For the student, the score will not count toward the diploma or appear on a school transcript, and the Department does not recommend counting it in a course grade. A strong score may still count toward a seal or an endorsement on the diploma. So most students will sit an exam that matters to their school and not to them.

Massachusetts is two years into that arrangement. Its voters ended the exam requirement for a diploma in November 2024, and students there still take the test. Since then the share of tenth graders meeting the state's expectations in English has gone from 57 percent to 51 and then to 45. In the first year more of them left answers blank, and state officials have said motivation is part of the reason, along with weaker results in the earlier grades. In June a council appointed by the Massachusetts governor recommended new state exams that would count toward graduation, saying that without one measure used everywhere, mastery means different things from one district to the next. If New York's scores fall the same way, those who already worry that the new diploma asks less will point to them, and a lower score cannot show whether students learned less or tried less.

If the exam will not decide who graduates, something else has to say what a diploma means. New York has already written that down. In July 2025 the Regents adopted the Portrait of a Graduate, which describes a New York graduate as six things: academically prepared, a creative innovator, a critical thinker, an effective communicator, a global citizen, and reflective and future focused. Most of that list does not fit on an answer key. So, as the plan stands, students will show the six through their own work, such as a project, a paper, or a presentation.

Somebody has to judge whether that work is good enough, and under the plan that happens locally. Each district has been asked to write a local assessment strategy, a plan for how it will measure what its students know and can do, and to post it publicly during the 2027 to 2028 school year. Rubrics from the Department are meant to keep the judging consistent from school to school. The state set the date and left the method to each district.

From inside a classroom, the job looks like a grid: the six attributes across the top, every student down the side, and a box wherever they meet. Picture a teacher with 120 students. That is 720 boxes, and somebody has to fill each one. A rubric says what to look for. It does not supply the judge. As things stand, the teacher designs the projects and is the only judge of every one. The grid also has an effect nobody intends. To track a requirement that covers every student, a school has to list who has not met it yet. So the first thing a student hears about the Portrait is what they are missing.

New York already knows another way to do this job. Every spring about 100,000 New York students do something nobody requires of them. With a music teacher's help, at school or in private lessons, each one chooses a solo at their own level and gets it ready. Then the student travels to a host school and performs it for a trained adjudicator, who rates the performance against a published manual of standards and gives the student a written critique. The association that runs these festivals calls them evaluations, not competitions. Look at who is in that room: a student, a piece they chose, a teacher who helped them get ready, and a judge from outside their school.

Music teachers have the same job, judging what a student can do, and no music teacher has to do it alone, because of the solo festivals. No school district built those festivals, and neither did the state. New York's music teachers did, through their own association, the New York State School Music Association, or NYSSMA, which sponsors about 145 festivals each spring in districts that volunteer to host. A band director does not write the standard or train the judges, because both come with the festival. The director teaches a student to play, the student chooses the piece and chooses to come, and someone from outside the school says how good it is. That is a performance assessment, and 100,000 students a year sign up for it. Nobody has to wonder whether they are trying. The Portrait needs, in every subject, what NYSSMA does for music. Music has a published standard, trained judges from outside the school, and a way for a student to bring their best work to them. The Department's rubrics will give the Portrait the first. For most students, the other two are still to be built.

Now picture the same thing for a research paper in place of a clarinet solo.

One of those 120 students, a junior, has spent two winters measuring road salt in the creek behind the bus garage. Nobody assigns what happens next. The district has told its students one thing: work that passes outside review and is published counts toward the Portrait. So the junior chooses the creek study, because it is the best work they have done. Their teacher sends the draft back twice with questions, and when it is ready the junior records ten minutes explaining it. Three experts in the field, who do not know the student, score the recording blind against a public rubric a professor wrote. It meets the standard, and it is published. The first thing this student hears about the Portrait is that their best work counted. Had it fallen short, only the junior and the teacher would know, and they would try again.

That is how HScred works. Like the solo festival, it starts from what a student can already do, and the student is the one who decides to take part. Fifty-one students have published this way, in two pilots. NYSSMA has no connection to HScred; the comparison is mine.

Now go back to the teacher with the grid. For this piece of work nobody asked that teacher to design the project or be the only judge. The project was the junior's own, and three people outside the school did the judging, against a rubric a professor had written for the subject. What remained for the teacher is what only a teacher can do: ask the hard questions, send the draft back, and sign that the work is the student's own. That makes the teacher a proctor and a coach, on the student's side while the work is being made, because someone else decides whether it passes. A band director is in the same position when a student plays for a festival judge: the director got the student ready, and the rating comes from someone else.

A junior who spends two winters at a creek is the exception. That is the point: the exceptions go first. In most schools today, even a study like that one is read by one teacher, graded, and gone, and a school that loses its strongest work is losing everyone else's too. The strongest work is the place to start because it already exists. A district that counts published work toward the Portrait finds out where that work is without having to go looking for it. Normally that search costs money, in surveys and audits. Here students bring the work, because the district has said it counts, and what they bring is strong, because publishing is their choice and only work that passes outside review is published. So the first boxes on the grid are filled by the students who were ready first, and the district starts with a record of what its students can do, before it has to count who is behind. The district still decides which subjects' published work counts, and nobody is made to publish.

Then that work reaches the students who come next. Because it is a recording, it can be sent to experts anywhere and shown to next year's class. A rubric describes good work. A published study, made by someone their own age, shows it. I think most students who watch one will decide they can do as well or better, and I think many of them are right. So the district can recognize what is already working, and the first published works set the standard from one student to the next. That is how an exception becomes the rule.

The creek, the teacher, and the 720 boxes are all in one district. At the Board's November meeting, the Regents and the Commissioner talked about what the plan will take in every district. The Commissioner said the state has to make a huge investment to modernize and transform education, and described a need for experts who can help teachers judge portfolios, projects, and presentations. One Regent asked how schools with fewer resources could carry out the changes as well as wealthier districts. The Chancellor of the Board pressed for grading standards that can be compared from one district to the next. And the Department has taken care to say that none of this lowers expectations.

Cost, experts, fairness, comparison, expectations. Those are five problems, and every district faces all five if it has to do its own judging. New York has about 700 school districts. If each one finds its own experts and pays for its own judging, the same thing gets built about 700 times. The districts with the least money would build the least, which is the fairness problem. Work that passes in one district could not be compared with work that passes in the next, because different people would be deciding what the rubric means in each place. And from outside, nobody could tell whether one district's bar was as high as another's.

Now picture the judging set up once, for every district at the same time. That is how the creek study was judged, and it is how HScred works today. The junior's district did not write that rubric or find those three experts. A professor wrote the rubric and chose the experts once, for the whole subject, and a student in any district in the state can send work to them.

Run through the five again. The experts are found once, and no teacher has to go looking for them. A student in the smallest district is scored against the same rubric as a student in the largest, by experts who know neither school, which answers fairness. Because every district's work goes to experts the same professor chose, and they all score against that one rubric, a published work means the same in one district as in the next. That is the comparison the Chancellor of the Board pressed for, and the one a Massachusetts council wants new exams to supply. The bar is set once, by someone who knows what college work requires, which is the plainest answer I know to the worry that a diploma no longer decided by an exam will ask less. That answer holds if Regents scores fall, because the evidence is the published work, and anyone can watch it. And an investment goes further when it builds the judging once than when every district builds its own.

That is what infrastructure is: the part that is built once and shared. It only works because it is shared. Nobody wants to change sides of the road at the county line, and a passing mark on a student's work is the same kind of thing. It has to mean the same in every district, or it stops meaning much in any of them.

It is also how a state takes care of its teachers. Recruiting outside judges, scheduling them, and making sure a score in one school means what it means in the next are logistics. None of that is teaching. When that part is built once, teachers keep the part only they can do.

HScred is a small piece of that infrastructure, already running. What limits it today is the number of subjects. A student can publish only in a subject where a professor has written the rubric and chosen the experts. HScred calls that opening a channel, and it starts with a thirty-minute conversation. New York's public universities have professors in every field a student might work in. No district can ask them all. The state can.

Asking them also gives the public universities a voice in the Portrait. The Department has said it is working with the colleges and universities that take New York's graduates, so that they understand and trust what the diploma will mean. The surest way to trust a standard is to help set it. In a channel the rubric is the professor's, so a professor who wants a higher bar can set one. The method is one universities already use on their own work, which is peer review: experts who do not know the author judge the work against a stated standard, and only what passes is published. One of the plan's critics asks for the same kind of scoring: the Fordham Institute recommends that student work be scored blind or by outside graders wherever possible. And the result can be checked. The rubric is public, so anyone who doubts the standard can read it, and an admissions office can watch the work and judge it against that rubric. A finished paper looks the same whether a student or a chatbot wrote it. A student defending the work on the record does not. Work that can be checked is work a university can trust.

Fifty-one students is a pilot and not a system. We have not yet shown how blind scoring by three experts holds up across thousands of students, and the open questions are posted. Being this small also means New York can still set the terms: which subjects come first, how a channel's rubric must line up with the state's own, and what the state would need to see before it trusted a channel's results.

What I want for every teacher holding that grid is time to teach. What I want for every student with work like the creek study is an audience that knows the field. Much of the plan is still being worked out, and I see an opportunity for both in that. Districts are drafting their strategies, the diploma rules are still pending, and the Department has said more guidance is coming on how schools decide whether student work meets expectations. That guidance can say that work published after review by outside experts may count toward the Portrait wherever a district accepts it. The state can invite the professors at its public universities to open channels, starting with the subjects it most wants to see. And it can invite the students who are ready to go first. None of the three asks a teacher to arrange anything. Each is something the state can do once, so that no teacher has to do it alone.

Every spring a ninth grader carries a clarinet into a room, plays for someone who knows music, and walks out knowing where they stand. New York's music teachers built that room themselves. We are building the one for the student down the hall with the research paper, one subject at a time, and fifty-one students have already walked in. New York can open it to every student.

Nadav Zeimer is a former NYC turnaround principal and the founder of HScred, Inc.

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