Billings Daily Digest Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Ty's Take
The state education board's approval of MAST as Montana's new statewide assessment comes with conditions attached, which is the only way these things ever work in a state as divided as ours on what kids ought to know and how we measure it. Out here in Billings, where we've got families with everything from oil-patch roots to university connections, that middle ground matters—we need our schools held to something real, but not something so rigid it breaks what makes teaching work. The conditions are the negotiation, and that's what public education in Montana has always been: figuring out what we can agree on when we don't start from the same place.
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