To whoever anonymously leaked a series of tests designed to prepare Montclair students for next year’s tough new academic standards, perhaps thinking it was a stroke of justice: Think again.
You aren’t taking it to the man. You’re taking it to the students. This reform is coming to Montclair no matter what. So how does your act of sabotage help kids?
District teachers worked through the summer to create these tests, to measure how students are doing with the new national standard known as the Common Core. The point is to prepare for the 2015 rollout of tougher state benchmarks.
Common Core is part of a national effort to raise the bar for all students. The testing allows educators to compare students’ progress based on the same high standards, so they can stay competitive with their peers in other countries.
But the public posting of these early tests, rendering many of them useless, is a blow to that progress in Montclair. The township’s board of education is investigating how many of the tests wound up on the internet, just days before students were supposed to take them. We still don’t know who did this or why.
Yet as the mayor pointed out, the most plausible motives are either cheating or thwarting the new assessment process. And only teachers and senior staff had passwords to access the testing materials.
There are people in this district, and across the country, who don’t like the Common Core or standardized testing. But the thought that someone might purposefully leak the preparatory tests, simply because they don’t agree with this program, is disheartening.
It’s one thing to publicly criticize new educational standards. It’s another to purposefully undermine them. To those cheering on the supposed defeat of Common Core in Montclair: Get over yourselves, and think of the kids.