Flathead County School Districts, on Average, Top Statewide MAST Test Results

As schools’ results from the first year with the newly minted Montana Aligned to Standards Through-Year Assessment (MAST) in place roll in, a majority of Flathead County’s school districts met or exceeded statewide proficiency rates in English language arts, while just over half of the county’s public districts did the same in math for the 2024-2025 school year.

MAST exams fully replaced the state’s previous assessment system, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, just last year.

The MAST program tests students in bite-sized chunks throughout the school year, rather than offering one single testing period. Montana is one of the first states to adopt the system of testing, though other states have looked to follow suit.

Statewide, 43.1% of Montana’s third through eighth grade students tested at or above proficiency in MAST’s ELA portion. In math, 36.9% of third through eighth graders were at or above proficient.

Across Flathead County, 50.4% of students tested at or above proficient in ELA, and 42.5% did so in math.

Administrators cautioned against using the results as a lone measuring stick for districts’ success, however.

“In my conversations with school administrators across Montana, there is broad agreement that a new assessment and its reliability has not yet been fully established,” Rob Watson, the director of School Administrators of Montana, wrote in an email to the Beacon. “While we hope the results will help inform instruction and identify areas for support, it would be premature to make broad or high-stakes decisions based on a single year of data.”

In Flathead County, 14 of 19 districts saw higher proficiency rates in ELA than the statewide results. One county district, Pleasant Valley, did not have results available through the state’s Office of Public Instruction.

The Whitefish School District and Deer Park School had the highest proficiency rates in the county, with 62.31% and 61.87% of their students testing at or above proficient in reading and writing, respectively.

“We’re thrilled with our scores, and we attribute our success to our outstanding staff,” said Lisa Bloom, the curriculum director at Whitefish Schools. “They are really invested in our students, and our students are really invested in their own learning, I think. So, we feel really proud of the scores that we were able to obtain with the MAST tests in general I’d say.”

Whitefish Schools also topped the county for math proficiency rates. Bloom credited part of the district’s success to teachers’ professional learning communities. Those communities consist of weekly hour-long sessions where teachers meet with colleagues and discuss trends, best practices and more.

A slew of other local districts — Bigfork, Cayuse Prairie, Fair-Mont-Egan, Kalispell, Olney-Bissell, Somers, West Glacier and West Valley — had 50% or more of their students test at or above proficient.

Four Flathead County districts fell below the statewide proficiency rate: Columbia Falls (41.41%), Evergreen (30.58%), Helena Flats (39.38%) and Marion (31.19%).

Cory Dziowgo, the superintendent at Columbia Falls Schools, said the district is treating the test like a baseline.

“It’s hard to put a lot of stake in the data when it’s so new,” said Ted Miller, the principal at Columbia Falls Junior High.

Miller said when assessed grade level by grade level, some grades saw better scores than others. But taken as a whole, Dziowgo said there were areas where the district was excited to see it was doing well. Conversely, there were also areas where it could improve. He said that assessment rings true for his district, and for students across the state.

On the math portion of the test, Flathead County’s districts saw more mixed results. Only 10 of the county’s 19 public districts exceeded statewide proficiency levels. Again, Pleasant Valley’s results were not available on the Office of Public Instruction’s website.

Of the 10 districts above statewide proficiency levels, four saw more than 50% of their students at or above proficiency: Cayuse Prairie, Deer Park, Fair-Mont-Egan and Whitefish.

Amy Piazzola, the Cayuse Prairie superintendent, attributed the high scores to her staff. Through internal testing, Piazzola’s staff identifies areas where students might need extra help to reach a learning standard. They then provide tailored interventions to get students that help. Much of that comes through para-educators, Piazzola said.

Tina Blair, who took over as Fair-Mont-Egan’s top administrator this school year, attributed her district’s high test scores in math and ELA to a combination of experience with the MAST tests and a literacy grant the district earned. Her district was part of MAST’s pilot — which began in 2022, years before the test was fully implemented — and said the familiarity with the testing system likely helped her district achieve high scores.

Blair also echoed Piazzola’s remarks about staff. A top priority for her in her small, rural district is teacher retention. She said long-serving teachers bring “value-added” to the classroom — which refers to a method to estimate how much individual teachers aid student learning beyond typical growth. More experienced teachers tend to develop larger “teacher toolboxes,” and can in turn help less experienced teachers build their own. She said she has many para-educators who have longstanding relationships with students, an example of value-added that she said aids students, and that likely reflects in their test scores.

Eight districts in the county fell below the statewide proficiency rates. In those districts, roughly a third or fewer of their students tested proficient or above in math. Four fell below the 30% threshold: Marion (13.98%), Smith Valley (28.32%), Swan River (22.22%) and West Glacier (29.41%).

Josh Lee, who took over as principal at Swan River School this fall, said the MAST scores his district earned in math do “not align with our internal data or what we see daily in classrooms.”

“While we recognize math as an area of growth for our school, our local assessments and classroom performance indicate a stronger picture of student understanding than the MAST results suggest,” Lee wrote in an email to the Beacon. “Because of that, we are using multiple data points, not a single test to guide our work. This year, we have increased our focus on math instruction, including the adoption of a new, more aligned math curriculum and additional instructional support as needed and available.”

Several administrators the Beacon spoke to in the process of reporting this story cautioned that the MAST results shouldn’t serve as the sole indicator of how their districts fare when it comes to teaching students.

Dziowgo, the superintendent at Columbia Falls, said instead, a clearer picture of how a student is doing in school emerges when the results of MAST testing, internal assessments and classroom assessments are combined as data points.

“As a teacher and as an administrator, I have never put high stakes on testing,” Piazzola, the Cayuse Prairie superintendent, said. “It is a snapshot in the day of the life of a kid.”

As a new administrator, Lee said he couldn’t speak to the test’s rollout. But he did point to frustrations from his staff about the test — frustrations other administrators in the area echoed. In an Office of Public Instruction survey presented to the Board of Public Education this summer, teachers across the state reported difficulties with administering the test in its first year, saying it took far more time than anticipated.

Piazzola, for instance, said math teachers in her rural district spent 13 periods on average on MAST testing throughout the 2024-2025 school year — the equivalent of more than three weeks’ worth of math lessons for the district, which uses a four-day school week. And Miller, with Columbia Falls Junior High, said challenges crop up when students aren’t present for designated testing periods. Teachers then must coordinate make-up testing periods, which snowballs as the school year presses onward.  

In the survey, teachers also cited concerns about the teaching approach the tests promote, with teachers feeling squeezed to “teach to the test.” More than half of the teachers who responded to the survey felt students learned less using the testlet model, where schools assess students on bite-sized chunks of information several times per year.

“With those frustrations, a lot of administrators in the area aren’t really putting a lot of stock in the results because of how it was rolled out and communicated and scored,” Lee said.

Several local administrators also said they didn’t receive results from the previous year until the next school year had already begun. It rendered the test ineffective as a tool to identify areas where students might need extra help in a timely manner. Many also said the test visited topics only once, an approach that doesn’t offer a chance for students to show improvement on a topic. That’s something educators pointed to as a critical piece of the testing process.

“As we look at this, I think the thing that has been more hard for us to swallow is we use the district test that we administer three times a year to help drive our instruction and interventions for all of our kids,” Piazzola said. “We do not use the MAST test. The MAST test is basically a hoop that we have to jump through.”

Even with the concerns and critiques about the testing process in its first year, some administrators said MAST has improved as they’ve used it during the current school year.

Bloom, with the Whitefish School District, said the amount of time the testlets take to administer has shortened. She also pointed to a reduction in the number of testlets students must take throughout the year and more clear rubrics for the ELA tests as improvements her staff has noticed. The improvements indicate to educators that their feedback is being considered by the Office of Public Instruction as the state moves forward with the still-new testing program.

Blair, with Fair-Mont-Egan, said she doesn’t want to dismiss concerns about the test, but added it’s important to remain mindful that this is what schools are working with for now. She said it’s important to “continue to teach our children well.”

“It’s a baseline,” Blair said. “I want to be positive, want to face it with a positive mindset and want instructors to face it with a positive mindset. It was heavily developed in Montana and for Montanans, and I look forward to using that measurement for our students. This is the base.”

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