Sharon Rensher describes stakeholder engagement and student feedback on Regents

Thank you, First Deputy Chancellor, and good afternoon, Chair Dinnowitz, and of course, Committee Member Wong, and also all of the colleagues who are not here to share this information with.

My name is Sharon Rensher.

I'm Senior Executive Director for State and Federal Education Policy and Planning on the FDC's team.

We use FDC, you know, that's First Deputy Chancellor.

We like calling her FDC.

And again, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

So as our FTC has shared, we come before you not only as implementers of a state policy, but as genuine believers in this, in what New York City Inspires can accomplish.

And as we've continued to describe, of course, what NYCPS is going and where we're going with NY Inspires, just to share with you a little bit of what we've done so far, how we're doing.

We've been engaged with our stakeholders in this process.

So as FTC shared after Commissioner Betty Rosa did initiate this conversation

and establish the Blue Ribbon Commission, we did have 10 members who served on the Blue Ribbon Commission, and that included not only our teachers and our parents and our students, our community members.

There were actually 10 members that actually represented us, of course.

After the Blue Ribbon Commission, we did, or as it was established, we held in 2020 and 2021 stakeholder engagement meetings across our city and every borough.

We actually had two in every borough, and they were well represented by all of our stakeholders.

And, of course, we heard from our stakeholders, but particularly from our students.

And I'll share with you some of what our students have shared, as well as just talk to you about some of the engagement that happened after that.

Both current and high school students and recent graduates.

And you probably heard this as well, and we have students who are represented here who probably could share some of their same thoughts.

But they shared very clearly strong opinions with clarity, with passion.

They told us that the amount of time devoted to Regents exam prep during their high school years was excessive.

They described it as time taken away from learning, from the projects, the internships, the community experiences, the creative and collaborative work that they've done.

believed would have actually prepared them for college and for careers.

And the recent graduates were particularly direct about the gap they had experienced.

They arrived at the CUNY and SUNY colleges having spent years practicing passing tests and found that college expected something very different from them.

They expected

independent research, analytical writing across disciplines, collaborative problem solving, creative and critical thinking across ambiguous open-ended challenges.

These were the skills their professors expected from them from day one, and these were precisely the skills that their high school experiences had given them the least time to develop, and now New York Inspires will give us the opportunity to support them with those.

So not only was New York City Public Schools present in the community engagement process and directly represented on the Blue Ribbon Commission, we then held ambassador stakeholder meetings in every borough

to share back, and actually were the commission members or commission representatives who actually conducted these ambassador stakeholder meetings in every community.

And we did, again, hear from our parents, from our teachers, from our school administrators and our students what they would like us to see and how they would like to be further engaged.

And this is now the opportunity for us to actually engage them further.

I will share with you that we are very much engaged, continually engaged in structures across the state.

both with the state and with our partners at the Big Five districts and our BOCES partners across the state as we're thinking about and strategically planning, and we also have robust stakeholder

representation in those conversations.

And that will lead us, again, to further develop how we're going to engage our stakeholders going forward.