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New York’s educational leaders have laid out their vision for the next big thing: no more mandatory Regents exams.

That historic change, slated to launch three years from now, would be coupled with yet more consequential requirements – that schools devise multiple ways of measuring student achievement, and that they meet new standards of proficiency in such areas as critical thinking, global citizenship, literacy, communication and social-emotional competence.

The plan marks the latest chapter in the debate over how to measure student, teacher and school performance. The debate has been ongoing since at least 2010, when the state tied test scores to teacher evaluations. Gov. Andrew Cuomo successfully pushed to give test scores even greater weight in 2015. Teachers objected, and so did many parents, arguing that the emphasis on high-stakes testing was over-stressing children and harming education. A movement grew........

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