New Jersey School District Cancels Testing After Exams Are Leaked on the Internet

By AL BAKER

Published: October 28, 2013

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Testing of public school students in a New York City suburb was canceled on Monday after someone anonymously posted several of the exams on a public website, officials said.

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The breach of test security in the Montclair, N.J., school district was discovered by a parent on Friday, leading to a “full legal investigation,” said Penny MacCormack, the superintendent. She said that only “teachers and senior staff here would have password access” to the secure web portal that contains the exams.

The tests were developed by Montclair teachers over the summer to help measure how students were faring with the new curricular standard known as the Common Core. Students in kindergarten through 12th grade were scheduled to take several of the tests this week in various subjects. But of the 60 different exams, at least 14 were made public, and the district now assumes that the rest could be “out there” in cyberspace, Dr. MacCormack said.

She said the district was now leaving it up to schools to decide whether to use the tests, perhaps as learning tools if not measures of progress. For students in the sixth through 12th grades, the tests would have factored into their class grades.

“I am asking our principals to work with their teacher teams to determine how the assessments can be used to determine student preparation for the major learning standards without attaching student grades,” Dr. MacCormack wrote in a letter to parents Monday evening. The leaking of the tests comes at a pivotal time in education around the nation, as forces for and against the Common Core and testing face off in increasingly hostile tones.

Last week, the New York State Education Department took steps to ease some testing requirements after weeks of criticism from parents and teachers about the quantity and difficulty of the exams.

Parents in Montclair have also raised concerns, and Sunday, an effort called “Assessmentgate” was begun on Twitter and Facebook to rally parents against the local tests.

Christopher L. Len, 39, whose son is in third grade at the Charles H. Bullock school, said Monday that testing was taking time away from more worthy pursuits. “If they don’t learn now how to initiate a conversation, how to cooperate, how to be a good friend, then I think their elementary school experience will have failed them,” he said.

The displeasure is not universally felt; a petition on Change.org urging support for the district’s administration, for example, had more than 400 signatures as of Monday night.

Lois Whipple, of the Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence, which raises money primarily for grants for teachers, said the situation in the district highlighted the unintended consequences — “bad and good” — that could emanate from reform efforts.

“Montclair, like the rest of the country, is involved in a big philosophical, educational, pedagogical divide,” Ms. Whipple said. She also said she was stumped over whether the disclosure of the assessments was an accident, an act of sabotage or something else.

A parent discovered this week’s tests posted on gobookee.org, a website offering books and documents for download, according to the local teachers’ union. The tests were gone from the site by Monday; a group calling itself Anonymous, in the spirit of the amorphous global hacking network, claimed to local news blogs that it was responsible for the leak.

Dr. MacCormack said the testing was intended to prepare students for 2015, when New Jersey is expected to begin administering state tests aligned to the Common Core. New York began this year and saw passing rates plummet.

She said that the local tests would have had no bearing on the rating of an individual school or teacher’s performance and would not have counted in class grades for younger students. Robin B. Kulwin, president of the Montclair Board of Education, said the community would not tolerate a school system that did nothing to prepare its students for more rigorous standards.

“Come 2015, if we do nothing, it’s going to be unacceptable,” she said. “I think it’s good to have a plan, and by the way, a plan that can be tweaked and is not set in stone.”