A student who walked into ninth grade anywhere in New York in September 2024, in Plattsburgh or Poughkeepsie or Port Jefferson, has already sat for Regents examinations and will sit for more. Whether passing any of them determines that student's diploma is a question the Board of Regents takes up at nine o'clock on Monday morning.

The item is numbered BR (A) 4 REVISED, it sits at the top of the full board agenda, and it carries a single question. "Should the Board of Regents direct Department staff to take the necessary steps (including regulatory amendments, field memoranda, and any other necessary activities) to sunset diploma assessment requirements and move to one diploma beginning in the 2027-2028 school year?" The answer the department is asking for is yes.

What that would end is the requirement that a New York student pass a set of Regents examinations to receive a high school diploma. What it would not end is the examinations themselves. The September item and the presentation filed with it keep the tests in place as measures of the state learning standards, and the accompanying slides state the position plainly: "Regents examinations were not designed to measure graduation readiness."

In place of the passing requirement, the department proposes what it calls local assessment strategies, described in the item as work that "districts and schools would instead develop" to "provide a robust picture of students' knowledge, skills, and accomplishments." The evidence contemplated includes classroom assessments, student work, performance-based learning, educator observations and state assessments, weighed together rather than reduced to a single score on a single June afternoon.

New York currently issues three diplomas, the Local Diploma, the Regents Diploma and the Regents Diploma with Advanced Designation, and the proposal collapses them into one New York State High School Diploma for students graduating in 2028 and after. Advanced Designation does not disappear so much as change category, becoming a seal or endorsement that a district may add to recognize additional achievement. Districts keep the ability to mark distinction; they lose the ability to mark it as a separate tier of diploma.

The timing turns on cohorts, and the department's own definition is the thing parents most often get wrong. A cohort, in the state's usage, "consists of all students who first entered grade 9 in a particular school year," which means the 2026 cohort is not the class graduating this June but the students starting high school this month. Read against the department's cohort chart, the line falls in a place that surprises most families who have been following the story loosely.

Students in the 2023 cohort and earlier stay under current requirements and finish with one of the three existing diplomas, with an exemption route available to eligible students after major life events. Students in the 2024, 2025 and 2026 cohorts keep their current credit requirements but receive the single diploma, with the assessment requirement decoupled for the 2027-28 school year and local assessment strategies supplying the evidence in its place. Students in the 2027 and 2028 cohorts get the single diploma alongside redefined learning experiences, and the 2029 cohort moves into full implementation, including a statewide transcript and a requirement to demonstrate proficiency in both the learning standards and the state's Portrait of a Graduate.

The Portrait of a Graduate is the document underneath all of it, adopted by the Board in July 2025 after a Blue Ribbon Commission delivered twelve recommendations on what a New York diploma ought to certify. Jeffrey Matteson, the department's senior deputy commissioner for education policy, described the shift to New York Focus in June as movement "away from an outdated factory-style education model toward a model system built for how students actually learn."

Shannon Logan, the department's director of strategic priorities and coordination, put the operating principle in a sentence that districts will spend the next two years interpreting. "What will matter moving forward is the quality and substance of the evidence that a student produces, not the particular route that produced it or how long it took," Logan told the same outlet. Deputy Commissioner Angelique Johnson-Dingle, whose name appears on Monday's item, has argued that current transcripts do not "adequately reflect what a student knows and what they are able to do."

Monday's vote does not itself change a single regulation. The regulatory work runs through Part 100 of the Commissioner's Regulations, and the presentation identifies Section 100.5 as the center of it, with subdivision (a) carrying general diploma requirements, subdivisions (b) and (c) carrying the additional requirements for the Regents and Local diplomas, and subdivision (d) carrying the alternatives to both. Every reference to required assessments comes out, and every place in Title 8 that distinguishes a Regents diploma from a Local one has to be rewritten.

That work arrives at the Board as a discussion item in February 2027, comes back for adoption in June 2027, and takes effect on July 1, 2027, in time for the 2027-28 school year. A district that wants to influence the language has roughly nine months before the adoption vote, and the schedule is published in the item filed for Monday.

The accountability question is the one the presentation handles most carefully, because federal law does not permit New York to simply stop testing. Regents exams have been carrying three jobs at once, showing what a student can do against the standards, feeding statewide accountability reporting, and standing in as evidence of readiness for what comes after high school. The proposal separates those jobs, leaving the standards work with the Regents exams, moving federal accountability onto high school ESSA assessments, and assigning readiness evidence to the local assessment strategies. Department staff return to the Board in November with New York's federal ESSA plan revisions and further accountability changes.

For districts, the practical weight of this lands on capacity rather than philosophy. A performance-based assessment system requires teachers trained to design and score it, time built into the calendar to do the scoring, and a moderation process that makes a Rochester portfolio mean the same thing as a Riverhead portfolio. The department has promised guidance, templates and webinars, and the gap between a template and a functioning system is the gap that superintendents will be asked about at board meetings this fall.

The gap also runs into what students arrive at ninth grade already able to do. New York's reading results have been moving in the wrong direction, and our reporting on why New York students are reading fewer whole books traced part of the drop to classroom practice rather than to testing policy. A diploma that certifies competency instead of exam passage rests harder on instruction in the grades before high school, which is the argument Jeff Smink, deputy director of EdTrust-New York, has pressed about strengthening K-8 instruction before the new system takes weight.

Downstream, the diploma is increasingly measured against a number the state does not set. Federal rules now test college programs against the earnings of high school graduates, and our guide to New York's earnings threshold lays out what that benchmark does to program eligibility. A single diploma with optional seals changes what an admissions office or an employer reads on a transcript, and the seals become the signal that the Advanced Designation used to send.

The Board webcasts Monday's session on the State Education Department's YouTube channel, and the diploma item holds the first two hours of the day, from nine to eleven. The next scheduled step after a yes vote is a guidance memo to schools explaining what changes for which cohort, followed by the November accountability item and the February 2027 regulatory filing.