Montclair High School climbed in this year’s U.S. News and World Report rankings, landing at 90th in New Jersey, up five spots from last year, and 1,677th nationally, up from 1,887th. The overall score rose to 90.65 out of 100. The gain traces to a specific place: how many students take and pass college level exams, not the school’s raw test scores, which still trail the state average in several categories.
Why Did the Mhs Ranking Go Up This Year?
U.S. News scores high schools on five factors, and college readiness carries the most weight of any of them. Montclair’s improvement came from that category and one other. The district ranked 69th among New Jersey’s 415 ranked schools on the College Readiness Index, a measure of how many students take and pass Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams. That puts Montclair in the top 20 percent of ranked schools statewide on this measure. The district also ranked 58th on the College Curriculum Breadth Index, worth 10 percent of the total score, which measures how many different AP and IB courses a school actually offers its students, another top-15-percent showing. Fifty-nine percent of Montclair students took at least one AP exam this year, and 51 percent passed one. Graduation held steady at 94 percent, around the state median.
While that progress on exam access is real, it also is not the same as improving how students perform on standardized tests, which together account for 40 percent of the U.S. News score and is where the rankings tell a more complicated story.
Where the District Still Falls Short
The ranking rose without much help from state test scores, the two categories weighted 20 percent apiece. Montclair placed 128th in the state for assessment proficiency, a measure of how many students meet grade level standards, and 152nd for assessment performance, which tracks how far above or below that standard students actually score. Both land the school closer to the middle of New Jersey’s 415 ranked schools than the top third it reached on college readiness. Math proficiency sits at 42 percent and science at 44 percent, both trailing reading’s 68 percent. The gap between rising AP participation and flat proficiency numbers is the more honest read on where the school stands heading into next year.
It is also a reminder of just how much was riding on the district’s finances holding together this year.
The Budget Backdrop, in Brief
Montclair families do not need a recap of how bad the deficit got. The $19.6 million shortfall across the 2024-25 and 2025-26 budgets, the canceled December referendum, the rescheduled March vote and the 36 planned layoffs are the year Montclair families already lived through. What is worth noting here is where that story landed: voluntary departures and reassignments brought the final layoff count down to 16, and on August 5, Superintendent Ruth Turner told the board the district now expects to close the fiscal year with a positive fund balance of about $1 million, a reversal from the $12.7 million deficit reported the year before. That same meeting brought the forensic audit residents had been asking for since last fall, with the board hiring EisnerAmper for up to $250,000 to trace how the deficit built up. The tax bill is the part still being felt: the average Montclair home is carrying a combined increase near $1,540 this year.
What to Watch Next
The ranking’s rise this year happened alongside a district still finishing its recovery, not one that had already closed the book on it. The forensic audit is the thread that matters most going forward. Its findings will likely shape how residents judge the mismanagement that created the deficit, and they could become a central issue in the fall school board election, when voters decide who inherits whatever the audit turns up. For now, the classroom numbers held up through a year the budget did not.
Want the tax bill breakdown, this year’s busing changes and where the new phone policy stands? Read the Pod’s full back-to-school guide.
