Good news: New York’s high-school graduation rate rose to 86.1% last year, with the city hitting 82%. Bad news: Many of those diplomas are worthless, because the Board of Regents and State Education Department tossed one of the chief academic requirements for graduating, the need to pass at least four Regents exams.

SED’s press release makes noise about how “the necessary Regents Exam exemptions” might have been a factor. But the fact is that the folks in charge of state education would love to do away with Regents testing forever, so that more schools can “succeed.” They’ve already canceled the latest round of the exams (which should have come last month), still citing COVID as their excuse even though all schools have been open since September 2020.

Graduation rates in the city and across the state have been steadily rising since 2005, when less than half of city kids finished in four years. But the recent progress is mainly about lower standards: The current crew of “leaders” (since the retirement of former Regents chief Meryl Tisch) have “modified” the rules more than a dozen times to create “alternative pathways” to graduating.

Some of those may be valid, but that they keep adding new ones shows the motive. Similarly, canceling the exams at the height of COVID didn’t seem outrageous, but (again) they keep doing it.

Ultimately, this is on Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who effectively appoints the Regents. And pulling his strings on this issue are the state’s teachers unions, whose support he needed to become speaker.

Parents, in short, can’t hold anyone accountable for this rolling disaster — except by leaving New York’s public schools entirely, as increasing numbers are doing. Count it as one more way the vested interests are destroying everything that once made New York great.