Montana commission launches data-driven "successful schools" study, opts for district-level analysis

Consultants hired to help Montana— esign a new funding analysis told the School Funding Interim Commission on Feb. 16 that they would use a "successful school districts" method to identify places performing above expectations and model the spending needed to replicate those results across the state. APA project lead Justin Silverstein told the commission the approach is data-driven and repeatable: "We're gonna throw everything on the wall," he said, inviting commissioners to name every measure of success they wanted the team to test.

The method will identify districts that show absolute performance, strong growth or better-than-expected results for a subgroup, examine how those districts spend their resources and then model what it would cost for the state to reach similar outcomes elsewhere. Robert Reichardt, the project's statistical lead, described a complementary "beat-the-odds" regression that looks for districts outperforming their predicted results given demographics.

Why it matters: commissioners pressed the consultants on practical limits. Montana's heavy mix of very small, rural districts produces suppressed subgroup counts and allocation quirks in accounting systems, which can hide what is being spent on English learners, at-risk students and some interventions. Commissioners and staff agreed that the first runs will therefore occur at the district level, where expenditure and performance linkage is easier to assemble.

What was decided: By acclamation — not formal roll-call vote — the commission asked staff and APA to proceed with district-level analysis and to bring back initial selection runs in April showing how many districts meet each criterion and their demographic profiles. The team will then refine criteria, add expenditure and efficiency screens, and present modeled cost results in June.

Data and constraints: APA and state staff listed the data they need to proceed: multiple years of district-level assessment results (the MAST tests and ACT), subgroup performance by student groups, chart-of-accounts expenditure detail, and staffing records. Consultants warned commissioners that community eligibility (CEP) rules and recent assessment changes make free-and-reduced-price-lunch measures and older proficiency series harder to compare without additional linkage to direct-certification or census-based proxies.

Next steps: Staff and consultants will assemble the datasets, run several selection lenses (absolute, growth, subgroup performance, and beat-the-odds), and return in April with candidate pools, efficiency-screen proposals and recommendations for how many districts to treat as "successful" for the expenditure analysis. The commission asked explicitly that contextual spreadsheets accompany the April runs so members could judge lists rather than raw cut scores.

The commission recessed for public comment and heard dozens of interventions about facilities and funding equity; those remarks shaped an afternoon panel on school facilities and state support.