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OPI Hires Investigator to Look into Test Score Reporting

Superintendent Elsie Arntzen announced last week that some test data submitted last year was "falsified"

By Justin Franz

GREAT FALLS — The Montana Office of Public Instruction is hiring an outside investigator to review policies related to reporting student proficiency data to the federal government a week after Superintendent Elsie Arntzen announced that some test data submitted last year was “falsified.”

The Helena firm Communication and Management Services is being contracted to do the review, OPI spokesman Dylan Klapmeier said Friday. The cost is still being worked out, he said.

The issue stems from Montana’s use of the ACT test, traditionally given to juniors as a test of college readiness, instead of Smarter Balanced tests that meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The state Board of Education approved the use of the ACT to reduce the amount of time students spend taking standardized tests.

The Smarter Balanced tests rate students in four categories from novice to proficient and the federal forms require reporting based on those ratings. The ACT results are scores ranging from 1 to 32.

Former Superintendent Denise Juneau has said officials did not have a formula to translate ACT scores to proficiency ratings, but the federal form forced the state to report a score. OPI entered the ACT test results as “proficient” with plans to revise the scores later.

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which is scheduled to replace No Child Left Behind beginning with the 2017-18 school year, allows for the use of nationally recognized high school academic assessments. Twelve states use the ACT or SAT for federal accountability, according to Education Week, a database of state tests. Seven have federal permission to use the college readiness tests, but still must go through a peer review process.

Montana’s peer review process was pushed back a year, a federal education official told The Billings Gazette.

Klapmeier said Friday that Arntzen found no documentation indicating the Department of Education knew Montana was submitting incorrect information.

Arntzen was asked about the federal reporting Thursday during a meeting of the Montana Association of Elementary and Middle School Principals in Great Falls.

“I’m sorry, I am a woman of integrity and I do believe that falsification of data, student data — not that it would harm the student because they receive their own test scores — but they had to years to work on this since it was agreed that the ACT would be the only benchmark test,” she told administrators. “The ACT does not comply with our Montana state standards, nor does it comply with what the federal government wanted for this assessment and it had to deal with different levels of proficiency. So when that level was filled in, and it was filled in falsely, that means all of our students that took the ACT were proficient?”

High school juniors will still be administered the ACT this spring and again in 2018, Arntzen said.

“Some of these students have never been to college before and to allow them that opportunity to say, ‘I could go to college,’ that was what the whole purpose of this is,” she said.

When asked about her support for preschool funding, Arntzen said in her travels around the state the top concern she heard was finding teachers for rural schools.

“So I do believe in our tight, fiscal minds, we have to say that wish list is big,” Arntzen said. “If the Legislature does so happen, because it would take that opportunity to occur, if that happens then I would do that within my power and with your energy in this room, to put that forward for our neediest and our youngest. I would not impede that.”

Great Falls Superintendent Tammy Lacey called her answer “disheartening.”