IT’S WRONG to make a school exam public before students take it. And those who use the Internet have no expectation of privacy.
Those irrefutable facts may be getting lost amid an ongoing controversy over the state’s PARCC exam that many public school students began taking this month. Anxiety over the test, which was already high among some parents, grew even more intense over the last few days amid allegations that the testing company, Pearson, was “spying” on students by monitoring their comments about the test on Twitter and other social media.
Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan Jr., D-Middlesex, the chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, calls some of the reported accounts “disturbing.” Diegnan has asked the state education commissioner and the company to attend a committee hearing on the topic today.
Additional facts may come out, but judging from what is known so far, this latest firestorm appears to be much ado about little.
