Last Monday, the New York Times reported that an advisory group for New York’s Education Department, under pressure to fix slumping graduation rates at its public schools, would propose not improving the education of the students but making the Regents Examinations, which the state has required since 1876 for a high-school diploma, optional. Other options such as “capstone projects,” presentations, or “performance-based assessments” would also enable graduation.

The recommendation — which has a fair chance of becoming policy — is an insult to the intelligence of citizens, a betrayal of New York parents and students, and a depressing if implicit concession by the state that it is losing hope of educating a new generation of public-school children to the standards of their predecessors. It is framed in the Times as New York falling in line with the rest of the country, where high-school exit exams once prevailed but are now limited to New York, Massachusetts, and Florida. But it is an understatement to say that the proposed alternatives to the Regents Exam are less challenging and more malleable for teachers and administrators to game than a test in multiple-choice and essay-writing format measuring core knowledge across a broad spectrum of topics. These gauzier, more “holistic” approaches are meant to allow judgment calls to supersede accurate assessment, and the reason for that is that, over the past several decades, American schoolchildren have begun underperforming on almost all standardized assessments relative to earlier generations.

What offends the most about the proposal to make the Regents Exam optional is that it is understood by all that the children of the ambitious, upwardly mobile, or rich will continue to take standardized tests to distinguish themselves from their competitors for admission to top undergraduate schools. Rather, this is merely a shabby way for New York’s Education Department to help “clear the books” of students whose educational experiences have not prepared them for life. Unstated, but no secret, is the disparate impact this will have on black and Hispanic students who are disproportionately likely to be given a diploma as a substitute for an education. Instead of teaching them properly, New York cynically proposes to choose the path of least resistance: lowering standards to the point of near-indeterminacy, so that undertaught students can be handed a certificate and passed along to the workforce or the undergraduate system as someone else’s problem to fix. This proposition signals that the highest educational priority for the State of New York is to mask the collapse of its standards. But cheer up: At least this will benefit unionized teachers who prefer less scrutiny of what exactly their students are learning.

National Review recently opposed the removal of standardized-testing requirements in significantly different circumstances, those of elite-college admissions. We oppose New York’s move to remove the Regents Exam requirement for graduating high-school students with equal, if not greater, conviction: While that matter affected Ivy League aspirants, this move would harm the vast majority of students in the New York State public-school system, including those whose life and career trajectories will never intersect with the elite institutions now lowering expectations for their generation.