The New York State Board of Regents has approved a proposal that will allow high school students to skip one of the Regents social studies exams in exchange for a career, arts or science assessment.
It's a change that supporters say would provide students with the necessary skills to find meaningful work and possibly result in higher graduation rates.
Dr. Anne Kress, president of Monroe Community College, sees this change as a wonderful opportunity for students. She also believes that in order to make a difference, it should involve more than test-swapping.
"I think the relationships that high schools should have with potential employers is much like the relationship that they should have with potential transfer colleges, so that when their students go on they know that they're ready for the college of their choice, but we also want students to meet the needs of employers upon graduation," Kress said.
Kress was co-chair of a blue ribbon task force that identified 13 technical exams that were deemed of equal or greater rigor to a Regents exam.
"We often say that 'This is not your father's manufacturing.' Advanced manufacturing as an example, is a highly technical field where you're really doing a lot of computer programming,” Kress said. “You're not going home at night washing under your nails with Lava soap. You're really engaged in much higher-order thinking and it requires a great deal of mathematics, a great deal of science, and a great deal of computer programming."
Students will be able to choose from 13 approved Career and Technical Education tests which follow several years of coursework. Twelve percent of New York high school students concentrate in a CTE field and 29 percent of all New York high school students take at least one CTE course during high school.
