Last Call For Foreign Language Regents Exams

New York City may be home to an estimated 800 languages but when it comes to the New York State Regents exams, the only one that counts is English. Next week New York students will take Regents exams in Spanish, French and Italian for the last time. Why? The better to save $700,000, of course. Thank goodness the city is getting ready to replace the tests with new ones to better grade teachers!

In order to get a “Regents diploma with advanced designation" students will still have to show proficiency in a foreign tongue, they'll just have to prove it to the their school district, not the state. How exactly that will work is still up in the air though. “If they don’t have the money to print the exams, will the state have the money to check on what the districts are testing?” John Carlino, a high school german teacher who is also the executive director of the New York State Association of Foreign Language Teachers, wondered aloud to the Times.

The decision to cut the assessment exams came after the the State Education Department requested $15 million for the tests from the Legislature and came back with just $7 million. Other exams lost to the budget included the January tests which used to make it easier for students ahead (or very behind) in their studies to graduate mid-year.

Students are rarely fans of the Regents exams but they served a noble purpose, especially the language tests. To drop them from the schedule to better save less than a million dollars seems un poco short-sighted. At least they seem to have dropped the idea of charging districts for individual Regents exams?