ALBANY – State lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it easier for high school students to graduate by allowing school districts to lift Regents exam requirements in favor of an alternative assessment that the state Department of Education would have to devise.

The proposal, which passed by a wide majority in the Senate last week, comes just one month before the state Board of Regents votes on whether all public schools in the state should raise the passing grade for Regents exams to 65 from 55. The simultaneous push by the Board of Regents to tighten testing standards and by the Legislature to loosen them reflects the fierce battle in New York over the value of quantitative standards. Mayor Bloomberg has staked his legacy on their importance, while legislators from both parties have found reasons to oppose them.

According to the bill that passed the Republican-led Senate last week, the commissioner of education would be required to establish a new assessment standard by summer 2008 that would be based on a portfolio of student work. Any school district could adopt the new graduation standard as an alternative to a student’s passing five Regents exams.

“Too much of the education establishment has gone way too far in taking steps that confuse standards and high stakes testing in the public mind,” a key legislative staff member, Steve Kaufman, said. “You can have the most rigorous standards and not have do-or-die tests.” Mr. Kaufman is chief of staff to the chairman of the Assembly’s education committee, Steven Sanders, a Democrat of Manhattan.

The Education Department currently allows 44 schools in the state, primarily in New York City, to graduate students based on a portfolio of work. Statewide standards removing those exceptions are set to take effect in 2009, however. If the Regents approve the higher failing grade for Regents exams, then every school would require students outside special-education programs to pass five Regents exams with a grade of 65 or better to graduate.

In a memo issued to lawmakers last month, the Commissioner of the Education Department, Richard Mills, outlined the reasons a portfolio standard should not be adopted. The memo said portfolios are impossible to standardize and costly to administer. It also raised the possibility that portfolio schools would balk at a statewide version of the assessment, and it noted that schools now using the alternative assessment have not yet demonstrated the strict standards required by the proposed bill.

The New York City Department of Education opposes the bill, on the ground that it contravenes the authority of the Regents in establishing standards. The department also opposes the notion of a single statewide standard of alternative assessment.

Business interests have emerged as a chief lobbyist against the standard. “The value of standards, and the consistent use of tests based on them, is that they allow employers, colleges, and the rest of the world to make apples-to-apples evaluations of high school graduates,” a spokesman for the Business Council of New York State, Matthew Maguire, said. “Before standards and standardized tests were enacted, there were concerns in the business community that a high school diploma was being devalued. Standards helped address that.”

The bill’s sponsor in the Assembly, Richard Brodsky, Democrat of Westchester, said, however, that the proposed elimination of an alternative to the Regents exams would prevent even some good students from graduating.

“The commissioner has confused high standards with standardized testing,” Mr. Brodsky said. “High standards are absolutely necessary. Standardized tests are a useful tool, but if not used properly they create a whole new class of smart, capable, competent victims.”

A similar portfolio bill passed the Senate last year but never made it out of the Assembly education committee. That the bill was reported this year to Ways and Means by the education committee suggested to some that it had greater traction in the lower chamber now. Yet a spokeswoman for the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, cast doubt on the bill’s prospects for passage this session. Asked yesterday about the bill, the spokeswoman, Eileen Larrabee, said: “The speaker is a strong believer in standards, and he has concerns about the Legislature overriding the Regents on the establishment of standards.”