Flexibility for Students, Responsibility for the System

This post is the second in a two-part series. In part one, "The False Choice We Keep Repeating," I explored how the science of reading exposed a false choice between meaning and structure. In this post, I turn to New York Inspires and examine how that same false choice is resurfacing at the system level.

Hello,

In last week’s post, I wrote about how the science of reading exposed a false choice between meaning and structure. That lesson has stayed with me because reading instruction is not the only place where education has been tempted by either/or thinking.

Right now, New York State is in the midst of a significant reform effort called New York Inspires. Even for readers outside the state, the questions this initiative raises about equity, rigor, and coherence will sound familiar.

What New York Inspires Is Trying to Do

New York Inspires is a state-led initiative aimed at improving student outcomes and experiences. It includes four major shifts: 

1. Adopting a Portrait of a Graduate

2. Redefining credits and learning experiences

3. Sunsetting required standardized graduation exams

4. Moving to one high school diploma

All four of these shifts matter, and they are deeply interconnected. In what follows, I want to focus on one in particular: the decision to decouple standardized graduation exams from earning a diploma. This is not because the other changes are unimportant, but because this shift carries significant implications for equity, comparability, and system-level responsibility.

As background, historically, New York has required students to pass Regents exams, state-developed, standardized end-of-course assessments that function as a common signal that a student has met graduation-level expectations. Under New York Inspires, Regents exams would no longer be the default requirement for graduation. Students could instead demonstrate proficiency through locally designed projects or performance-based assessments.

What I Am and Am Not Arguing

I want to be clear about my stance. I am not opposed to change, nor am I resistant to students demonstrating learning in multiple ways. I do not believe teachers lack the skill, creativity, or commitment to design meaningful assessments. Many educators already do this work exceptionally well.

I also do not love standardized tests in and of themselves. They can be flawed, unreliable, anxiety-producing for students, and distort instruction when test preparation replaces deep learning. Those critiques are real and worth taking seriously. However, abandoning a common measure without replacing it with something equally coherent is not the same as improving the system.

The both/and of New York Inspires

The both/and of New York Inspires is not asking students to do more. It is asking the system to do more of the right work. For students, this should remain an either/or. A student demonstrates proficiency through a Regents exam or through an approved alternative assessment, not both. For the system, however, the work is a both/and. The system must allow multiple pathways for students to show learning and ensure that every pathway is held to shared standards of rigor, validity, and alignment. Flexibility should live with students. Rigor should live with the system.

That means allowing students flexibility in how they demonstrate learning while maintaining shared expectations for rigor, validity, and alignment. To be clear, NYSED is actively working to articulate these expectations through guidance documents, rubrics, and frameworks, and that work matters.

However, documents do not create outcomes on their own. They describe intentions. The harder question is how those intentions are protected once implementation becomes local. Who is vetting district-developed projects? What internal and external safety nets exist to ensure that claims of rigor are more than self-reported? How do we know a project is truly aligned to standards simply because it is intended to be?

Without clear processes for calibration, validation, and review, we risk equating assertion with evidence. A district saying “we are rigorous” is not the same as a system being able to demonstrate rigor consistently across contexts. Real alignment requires sustained professional learning, shared exemplars, and mechanisms that allow the system to see variation before inequity hardens around it. Flexibility without those supports is not innovation. It is abdication.

A Pendulum Swing Away From Common Ground

Lately, New York Inspires has been feeling to me like the inverse of the Common Core movement. When Common Core emerged, one of its central ideas was that students are not only students of a particular state, but students of the United States. If that is true, then we need shared ways of understanding how students are doing across states, not to rank for ranking’s sake, but to learn from one another, identify strengths, and respond honestly when outcomes are uneven.

Before Common Core, each state had its own standards and assessments, making meaningful comparison across state lines nearly impossible. Common Core aimed to address that by creating shared expectations and, eventually, shared assessments. The goal was never comparison as judgment, but comparison as context. This video does a terrific job explaining the intention.

I often think about this using a simple example. I am 5'2". Within my family, I am of average height. When compared to the broader population, I am clearly below average. Both statements are true, and the difference lies entirely in context.

The intention was sound. Unfortunately, the pushback was swift. When states rejected Common Core in the name of local control, they retained authority over what counted as tall or short. As a result, even today, claims that one state performs better than another are often meaningless. States may test in the same grades, but they do not use the same assessments, standards, or psychometric calibration. Those technical details matter because they allow us to say whether students are truly performing better, worse, or about the same. Psychometric calibration refers to the statistical process used to ensure that an assessment measures what it claims to measure, that scores are comparable across administrations, and that results mean the same thing regardless of where or when the test is given. In other words, it is what allows us to trust that a score in one district or year means the same thing as a score in another.

New York Inspires swings the pendulum even further toward hyper-local control. Not only will New York struggle to compare its outcomes to other states, it risks losing the ability to compare outcomes across districts within the state. That should give us pause. When comparisons disappear, inequity does not vanish; it simply becomes harder to see.

Regionalization, Reliability, and Validity

Districts are also being encouraged to collaborate regionally with surrounding districts in order to foster higher levels of consistency. In theory, this kind of regionalization could help mitigate some of the variability that comes with local design, and the intent behind it is sound. However, consistency alone is not enough. Systems can be highly reliable (consistent) and still fundamentally invalid (measure the wrong things). It is entirely possible to be consistently wrong.

Regents exams, for all their flaws, already provide a common, consistent measure across the state. In that sense, educators may be investing significant time and energy recreating consistency that already exists, but now in project form. Consistency is only meaningful if what is being measured is worth measuring, and if the measure itself actually does the work it claims to do. In other words, without robust validation processes that examine whether these regional assessments truly measure the standards they are meant to measure, collaboration risks producing agreement rather than accuracy.

A McDonald’s Metaphor for Assessment Coherence

I have been explaining this concern lately with a metaphor that makes the issue easier to understand.

Imagine ordering a Quarter Pounder with Cheese at McDonald’s. No matter where you go in the US, you know what you are getting. That standardization is not about culinary excellence. It is about consistency, both for the servers as well as the customers.

Now imagine that the specifications disappear along with the scale. There is no longer a shared recipe, no agreed-upon measurements, and no external check to confirm what is being served. Every location would still say, “We served a Quarter Pounder,” but one might serve less meat, another more. One might skip the cheese altogether, while another substitutes brie or decides to offer a vegetarian option instead. The label remains, but the experience does not.

That is the risk of hyper-local control without shared measures of quality. It centers what schools are doing rather than what students have actually learned. If the goal is learning, we need some common way to know whether learning occurred.

The Risk of Getting the Story Wrong

If we do not get this right, I can imagine a future book club listening to a podcast about how New Yorkers were sold a story about New York Inspires, a story that promised equity and flexibility but overlooked the unglamorous work of coherence, calibration, and support.

The lesson from the science of reading applies here too. Meaning needs structure. Flexibility needs guardrails. Equity depends on both, not this or that. Both/and.

~Heather

P.S. This week’s Catch of the Week is The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Emerging Technologies and Trends in Education, a collaborative book and the brainchild of Dr. Brian Graham, superintendent of the Grand Island Central School District. The book explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in education, with a clear focus on innovative classroom applications, ethical considerations, and practical strategies for successful implementation in schools. Rather than treating AI as a futuristic abstraction, it grounds the conversation in how AI can enhance teaching, support personalized learning, and improve the systems that surround instruction.

I was honored to contribute a chapter titled, "Engagement in a Tech Integrated Classroom." Writing it gave me space to articulate an important truth. AI itself is neutral. It is neither engaging nor disengaging. Engagement emerges from how educators design learning experiences and how thoughtfully technology is integrated.

The chapter is structured around three core questions educators must now grapple with: What is engagement, really? What does engagement mean for teaching and learning in a world shaped by generative technology? And most importantly, what should we do about it?

Congrats again to Brian and all of the contributors for their thoughtful and thought-provoking work. I encourage you to check out the book and let me or any of the contributors know what you think.

P.P.S. Please remember to...

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