Blog
Built With Schools, Not Just For Them
Senior Manager of Portal Support
New Visions for Public Schools
Every June, Regents Exams mark a major milestone in every New York City high schooler’s path to graduation. Across New York City Public Schools, educators rely on the Portal by New Visions to ensure that Regents season isn’t a scramble but rather, the culmination of a year of data-informed and standards-aligned preparation that started the day students walked in the door.
The Portal was built — and continues to evolve — in direct response to what NYC educators have said they actually need. New Visions operates as an Affinity Partner Organization to a network of 71 NYC schools. That relationship is the engine that kickstarted the Portal. When educators in our network identified a systemic problem — a bottleneck in assessment logistics, a gap in how progress toward graduation was tracked, a need for a one-stop-shop data platform — our team worked alongside them to build a solution. Thanks to its effectiveness in meeting educators’ needs, the Portal is now available to all New York City public schools (as well as shelters operated by the Department of Homeless Services and more agencies to come).
Progress Toward Graduation: The “Core 4” and Knowing Which Students Need What
At the heart of the Portal is a simple idea: that having a seamless data infrastructure at their fingertips empowers educators with the insight they need to implement effective systems of intervention and support and move more students to and through graduation – a premise born out by steadily rising graduation rates.
The Portal’s Core 4 view tracks the four metrics most predictive of on-time graduation: attendance, grades, credit accumulation, and Regents progress.
What sets the Portal apart from off-the-shelf student performance management tools is that in a couple of clicks, administrators can configure the Portal for their students. They set the graduation pathway for each student — Regents, local, or Advanced Regents diploma — and they define what an “on track” course sequence looks like for their school.
When a student is flagged as falling behind, teachers can trust that the technology reflects reality. It’s not New Visions or the city or the district’s expectations; it’s the school’s own expectations.
Regents Planning Without the Spreadsheets
Ask anyone who has coordinated Regents registration by hand what it was like, and they’ll describe the same thing: weeks of cross-referencing transcripts, building spreadsheets, trying to figure out which students still need which exams — and then doing it all again when the data changes.
The Portal replaces all of that. It’s not just a static data dashboard but an interactive workflow tool. School leaders can schedule students for every Regents exam they still need, pulled automatically from each student’s transcript and course history. The logic is precise in ways that manual processes simply can’t be. The system won’t schedule a student for an exam they’ve already passed. It will flag a student who passed Algebra in 8th grade but still needs to sit for the Regents. It accounts for the full complexity of an Advanced Regents diploma, for which students must pass nine specific exams.
The Portal also surfaces a layer of planning that often goes overlooked: college readiness. A student may have passed a Regents exam, but not at the score threshold required for earning college credit. Passing at the college credit level means a student will not have to take remedial courses in college, saving them time and money toward their degree. The Portal flags those students and shows whether they’re currently enrolled in a course that could help them improve that score. It’s the kind of nuanced, individualized view that ensures every student is maximizing their opportunities, and no student falls through the cracks of an unreliable and outdated spreadsheet.
Full-Service Assessment Administration: From Scheduling to Scoring
Mock Regents are essential for building student confidence and identifying gaps before the real thing. But the operational burden of running them has traditionally fallen on one overworked person in every building.
The Portal changes that entirely. Individual teachers can schedule Mock Regents directly from the platform, for any selection of students: from a whole grade, to a single course, to a single section of that course. The system generates pre-slugged, student-specific answer sheets. After the exam, the Portal does the analysis.
And the analysis goes deep. Within 48 to 72 hours, teachers can see which questions students missed, which standards and sub-standards those questions map to, and — crucially — why students may have gotten them wrong, such as choosing the distractor answer or the answer with the right numbers but transposed.
Teachers then can shore up instruction on standards on which whole classes need support or work across periods to create small groups. They can print physical reports for individual students to take home, keeping families informed and engaged.
In addition to Mock Regents, New Visions has built and deployed (for free) our own interim assessments directly in the Portal — designed to be completed in a single class period, administered three times a year, and aligned to all the standards expected to be assessed. Math and ELA are available now. Science and social studies are being added this fall.
One Platform. Every Data Point That Matters.
The Portal isn’t a place to store data. It’s a place to use it — and the difference shows up most clearly when educators need to make tough decisions with limited resources.
Consider a common scenario that I’ve coached educators through during the individual support sessions I offer year-round: a school identifies 50 students who are performing below expectations and needs to assign 35 to available spots in an intervention group. Without connected data, that’s a difficult, subjective call. With the Portal, the answer becomes clearer. Pull in attendance data alongside academic performance. A severely chronically absent student with 50% attendance doesn’t need a seat in the support group, they need a different kind of intervention entirely, one focused on attendance.
This is the Portal’s core promise: not just faster data, but better decisions. Screener results from MAP, i-Ready, and Acadience sit alongside attendance records, and course grades. Teachers can triangulate what’s actually holding a student back, rather than reacting to one data point in isolation.
Proven Impact: A Tool for Systemic Progress
When data is timely, connected, and genuinely usable by the people closest to students, the results follow. Having a strong data and technological infrastructure doesn’t guarantee a school’s success on Regents or any other metric. But absent one, success is nearly impossible.
