By Nadav Zeimer

Assessment reform is education reform. Not curriculum. Not standards. The way we measure whether students have learned determines everything else. New York knows this—we've been wrestling with this question since 1864, when the Board of Regents launched America's first uniform state exams. Education reform is about to take a giant leap forward in New York again, since The Board of Regents formally adopted Portrait of a Graduate in July 2025 as a cornerstone of New York's future vision in academic assessment. The surprising part is that a barely funded, little known coalition is leading the way in POG implementation. 

While districts across America debate what might replace standardized testing, New York City already has something that is working. It’s called J4A, “Journalism for All.” I recently interviewed one of it’s chief architects, Katina Paron. 

Let’s step back a few weeks. In July POG was formally adopted. On September 16, more than 200 students and teachers gathered on City Hall steps for J-Day, the second annual action led by NYC Youth Journalism Coalition. They weren’t aware of POG. Their concrete wins were, as the name suggests, related to youth journalism: city leaders pledged expanded access, YJC launched courses across all five boroughs, and—thanks to Local Law 27/2025 that YJC championed—the Department of Education released its first public data on journalism opportunities. 

What made the day matter wasn't just the policy progress. It was watching students take the mic, stepping into positions of power in our city. Council members backed them with educators, and higher-ed leaders coaching them on—all united around a form of learning that happens to fully implement POG out of the box. 

The path forward isn't theoretical anymore. It's happening in this surprising corner of high school education - the classroom as newsroom. The truth is, what happens there isn't about journalism at all.. It is a model of what classrooms look like after standardized testing is phased out. It's about what journalism education represents for the future of assessment in America. 

New York State's Portrait of a Graduate (POG) asks for graduates who can think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate effectively, act with cultural and civic awareness, and apply learning across contexts. See my interview with Katina for more details. 

Reporting requires inquiry and analysis. Drafting and revising for an audience demands communication skills. Working on deadline with editors and peers builds collaboration. Engaging community stakeholders requires civic readiness and humility. This is exactly the kind of authentic, performance-based work that POG envisions—and it's already happening in NYC classrooms. 

Of course there are many other forms of project-based learning including all of STEAM. Couldn’t any of these equally represent the future? Certainly. The difference with any other form of project-based learning which POG will ultimately expand, is that journalism quickly bleeds into academic media more generally and that is a format that can be produced as units of what I call “academic capital.” Academic media is easily digitized, and the resulting digital tooling makes scale possible. 

Read elsewhere in my writing to learn more about what academic capital looks like, but the point is that 10-minute youth recordings represent what replaces standardized testing. It’s strengths-based (no Failing grades, just stories yet to be published). But I digress.  

Those backing YJC are not theorizing about alternatives to standardized testing—we're practicing them. Student journalists are producing real work for real audiences, building portfolios that demonstrate the competencies POG demands. Expanding journalism is the most effective first step to implement POG. A high school's journalism team is their POG implementation unit. And start reporting on science, publishing creative essays and poems. With a real audience, not work that will be stuffed into a teacher’s drawer, never to be seen again. That is the innovation that YJC represents. 

As students master the skills of researching, interviewing, drafting, and editing polished content for real audiences, they have these skills that other teachers can call on. Students have learned the joy of doing something hard, like walking up to a stranger with a microphone and camera (and stylish “youth journalist” hoodie). They know various story formats and how to edit these together in post-production. When it’s academic media you are editing, it’s repetition that cements concepts into the head through their hands and hearts. Learning is really a story, and if we can tell each student’s academic story - how they think and how their thinking has changed - we have arrived at a form of academic data clearly superior to standardized anything. 

A student investigating climate change produces a 10-minute video explaining complex environmental science. Another creates a podcast breaking down advanced mathematics concepts. Journalism teaches them the craft of presenting their thinking in compelling, accessible formats—and once they have that craft, every academic discipline becomes an opportunity for authentic demonstration of their skills. We're not just building journalism programs; we're launching academic media production centers serving as the future of how students show us how they think. How they invest time and attention to mint academic capital. These newsrooms are the perfect place to start POG implementation. Long before any teachers have to think about how to navigate the transition. Suddenly they can send students somewhere to get the help they need to produce high quality academic content. Especially in grades 11 and 12, when colleges want to meet them. 

The national conversation about moving beyond standardized testing often stalls because people can't picture what comes next. Academic youth media provides the answer. When a student investigates a community issue, interviews stakeholders, crafts a story that meets editorial standards, and publishes for a public audience, they're demonstrating mastery across multiple domains simultaneously. The work is its own assessment. This is what performance-based assessment means in practice: students creating evidence of learning that matters beyond the classroom. Other cities and states are searching for models. NYC has one that's working, that's scalable, and that students actually want to do.

The Regents timeline calls for POG implementation by 2028, offering performance-based alternatives to bubble sheets and speed essays. NYC doesn't need to invent this future—we can recognize and scale what's already succeeding. Start with journalism, look for other existing project-based learning to showcase, and POG becomes a very realizable future. And the videos these 11th and 12th graders produce for college admissions will be their own source of inspiration, and thus their own academic capital. Districts could even require newly funded newsrooms to cover a minimum coverage of programs that are working in other schools to celebrate and spread best practices. 

J4A is similar to AP for All in ambition—expanding access—but instead of standardizing tests, it would expand access to authentic performance-based assessment. The consortium schools and transfer schools have been doing this work for years. We have stories to tell and POG is encouraging us to do so. 

The students who stood on those City Hall steps in September showed us what's possible. They weren't performing for a test—they were demonstrating the real competencies our city and our country need. When Mayor-elect Mamdani takes office, he'll inherit both a mandate for educational innovation and a proven pathway to achieve it.

The question isn't whether NYC should pursue performance-based assessment through Portrait of a Graduate. The question is whether we'll recognize that student journalism has already shown us how to start doing it—and whether we'll have the courage to build on what already works.