Best School Districts in Montana 2026
Filtered to districts with 2+ schools and 200+ students. Data from NCES Common Core of Data + EDFacts assessment results.
No districts found for Montana matching the filter criteria.
Frequently Asked Questions
District-level proficiency data from EDFacts ranks the top public school districts in Montana. Top picks are above.
Top-ranked districts in Montana are listed above. Suburban districts adjacent to major metros tend to score highest on EDFacts assessments.
These are the best school **districts** by EDFacts proficiency. Individual schools within these districts may vary — a strong district usually has strong schools, but not always. For school-level rankings (elementary, middle, high), see our per-level ranking pages.
EDFacts proficiency rates can be compared state to state, but methodology varies (each state sets its own proficiency cut-score). For an apples-to-apples comparison across states, use the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — the "Nation's Report Card" — which administers the same test nationwide.
By average EDFacts proficiency rate (math + reading combined). We filter to districts with at least 2 schools and 200+ students enrolled, to exclude tiny single-school districts. Other ranking sites blend in teacher pay, parent reviews, demographics, and college outcomes — useful but more subjective. We use only federal data and rank by academic outcomes.
All data is sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (enrollment, school count) and EDFacts assessment results (proficiency rates). Both are federal data sources used by the US Department of Education. Rankings reflect the most recent reporting year available.
Districts ranked by average EDFacts proficiency (math + reading). Filtered to 2+ schools and 200+ students.
The this entity category groups every U.S. K-12 school outcomes and enrollment entity sharing this attribute. The list above is the data; the paragraphs below explain what the grouping means against the broader NCES Common Core of Data and EDFacts distribution and how to read the relative rankings within the category.
For readers using this category as a starting point, the per-entity detail pages linked from the table above carry the underlying NCES Common Core of Data and EDFacts data in full. The category-level view is the filter; the per-entity pages are the actual answer.
Source: NCES Common Core of Data, 2026.