One of the items still on the table in this final week of the legislative session in Albany is a bill that would direct the state education commissioner to come up with an alternative to the Regents exams required for a high school diploma in New York. The bill would also extend an existing waiver that has allowed 28 public high schools statewide to grant diplomas based on assignments other than standardized tests. Pupils might write a term paper or do a science experiment.

The bill has already passed the state Senate and is now before the assembly, where the speaker, Sheldon Silver, can either pass it or kill it. Our friends in the education policy community – including our celebrated columnist Andrew Wolf and Thos. Carroll of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability – are hoping the speaker will kill the bill, seeing it as a departure from the measurement, accountability, and standards that are essential to quality education. The New York Times and the Daily News are in agreement on the point.

The bill’s backers, though, insist they aren’t sacrificing standards. The bill summary they have prepared says that the law requires that the alternative, portfolio based assessment “be at least as rigorous” as the corresponding standardized test. Under the law, the students would have to pass the English and math Regents tests – the “alternative” assessments would apply in subjects such as science and history.

It’s important for a high school diploma to mean something, but our own sense is that college admissions officers and employers – and, for that matter, parents – have a way of sorting these things out for themselves. There are plenty of good private schools in the city that don’t require these particular exams for graduation and plenty of good public schools in other states that don’t require them.

Some parents want their children to take and pass as many tests as possible. Other parents may want their children to get a high school diploma without having to take these particular tests. It seems unnecessarily rigid to force those test-averse parents and children out of the public school system. The answer here, as in so many other questions of education policy, lies in the direction of vouchers that would take education policy decisions out of Speaker Silver’s hands and, for that matter, the Regents’, and put them in the hands where they belong, those of the parents.