One year ago, the Office of Public Instruction debuted a new system and a revised set of regulations designed to ensure that Montana’s more than 800 public schools meet a state-mandated threshold of educational quality. Now state and local education leaders are taking stock of those accreditation changes and identifying areas for ongoing improvement, a conversation that will continue to shape how Montana holds its K-12 schools accountable to state laws and the students they serve.

Under the new accreditation rules, OPI reported this month that 3% of Montana schools were ranked as “deficient” during the 2023-24 school year due to ongoing deviations from state quality requirements. One year prior, under the old rules, that total was 31%. But School Administrators of Montana Executive Director Rob Watson cautioned against comparing the latest accreditation results to past school years, since the system is now operating on a “totally new scoring system.”

“It’s really probably not accurate to compare your old score versus your new score because it’s like apples and oranges,” Watson told Montana Free Press in an interview.

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Accreditation has served for decades as one of the key ways Montana holds its public schools accountable to the educational assurances laid out in state law and the Montana Constitution. Every year, school administrators report to OPI on a series of metrics including staffing levels and qualifications, student test scores and implementation of local policies. Such metrics help determine whether schools have enough licensed teachers to cover classroom needs, whether class sizes meet state standards, and whether students are showing proficiency in core subjects like reading and math.

Any deviation from state requirements is logged and tracked over time and, if not addressed, results in a deficiency rating for the school. Such dings in state reports can threaten a school’s reputation, necessitate corrective action and, if left unaddressed, result in the possible loss of a school’s accredited status.

State and local education leaders have characterized the state’s former accreditation process as largely a series of check-boxes. But as of last July, new reporting requirements call for districts to submit a host of narrative documentation — comprehensive needs assessments, strategic action plans, generic profiles of school graduates — as further evidence of their work educating students and engaging with parents.

The Board of Public Education approved the changes in March 2023 after a lengthy and at-times contentious review by OPI of Montana’s accreditation rules, collectively known as Chapter 55. OPI put the new regulations into effect ahead of the 2023-24 school year. In numerous public statements this year, State Superintendent Elsie Arntzen has described the changes as providing improved accountability and transparency.

“The new process emphasizes more meaningful outcomes of school accreditation through the inclusion of a more robust and comprehensive view (of) how our schools serve our students,” OPI spokesperson Brian O’Leary told MTFP via email. “The changes to Chapter 55 focused on increased transparency and local accountability that verifies accreditation standards for school quality have been met.”

O’Leary added that the marked drop in schools rated as deficient this year is a direct result of the addition of new components to the accreditation process. Prior to 2023-24, schools employing one or more unlicensed teachers in their classrooms — an increasingly widespread occurrence statewide resulting from Montana’s ongoing teacher shortage — automatically earned them a deficiency status. Now such staffing considerations are just part of an expanded range of reporting requirements.

Laurie Barron, superintendent of the Flathead Valley’s Evergreen School District, said the documentation schools were required to submit this year wasn’t necessarily new for many districts. Evergreen, for example, has had a strategic action plan for more than a decade and regularly compiles its own needs assessment. The challenge, Barron told MTFP, was in matching those documents with OPI’s reporting system, and doing so on a tight deadline while also complying with a host of other legal and regulatory changes implemented by state lawmakers and education officials over the past year.

“There were so many new things last year that all came at one time from the Office of Public Instruction, from the Legislature, and schools are expected to implement those with fidelity and high quality,” Barron said. “I’m not sure that someone not in a school understood all the pressures from all the different areas coming on schools at one time.”

In recent deliberations with the Board of Public Education, several district superintendents expressed similar concern with the amount of documentation required by the new accreditation process and the amount of time it took local administrators to complete this spring. East Helena Schools Superintendent Dan Rispens cited several examples, including incompatibilities between the district’s existing planning and needs documents and what OPI required, which in some cases meant he had to “almost start from scratch.”

“The no-save feature, which I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about, was frustrating for some people,” Shelby Public Schools Superintendent Elliott Crump told the board, referencing administrators’ inability to save partial information entered into OPI’s accreditation portal. “There was a district that went through the process, computer went down, internet went down, they lost everything, they had to start over again.”

Crump also noted that the deadline for districts to complete their accreditation reporting this year — Good Friday — may “not have been the best choice,” as some districts recognize the date as a school holiday. Crump described the overall process as feeling like “busy work” for administrators that is “taking us away from what I believe we should be doing, working with students and providing them the best quality education we can.”

“I’ve been a superintendent in Montana for 14 years,” Crump said. “I spent less time in the classroom this past year than I ever have. I spent time filling out paperwork for accreditation that did not improve the education for my kids.”

Watson acknowledged that the new accreditation process is intensive and takes time to complete. But he also said it’s a more qualitative and comprehensive approach. While ensuring a school has enough licensed teachers to meet student needs is an important factor, Watson said, it’s “not the whole measure of school quality.”

“With this more comprehensive approach, it’s an opportunity for us to show all the other things that we’re doing that we feel reflect a quality education,” Watson continued. “We haven’t lost anything from the old standards, but we’ve actually changed the way that schools are evaluated in the state.”

In response to feedback from administrators, OPI agreed last week to allow districts to submit amendments to their accreditation status if they believe their score was impacted by errors or technical glitches this year. Writing on behalf of the agency, O’Leary told MTFP that challenges are likely to arise any time a state agency implements changes to a process “that has been in place since the 1970s.” Though she argued that Evergreen did much of the required work not for OPI or accreditation but for the good of the district, Barron said she believes accountability is important and recognizes that change can come with growing pains.

“It doesn’t matter how good it is, it’s still going to be challenging in the first run,” Barron said. “It was just so fast and there were so many different components and different focus on things that perhaps had not been as strong a focus in the past, even if they should have been.”

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This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

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