Someone reading Reza Namin’s press release might think that the Maine Indian Education school district has broken the code.
Test scores and chronic absenteeism rates there have seen a “significant multi-year turnaround,” according to Namin, making the tribal school district “a documented model worthy of national attention.”
To the media, on LinkedIn and on the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education’s website, Namin has boasted about the improvements at the three schools under his supervision, while also promoting his selection as one of 19 nominees for the National Association of School Superintendents power leadership award (the winner will be announced next month).
Namin’s numbers paint a rosy, but incomplete picture that is not reflective of testing performance school- or district-wide performance.
Maine Indian Education operates under dual jurisdiction of the state and federal Bureau of Indian Education and is overseen by a joint school board. Namin has led the district since 2021.
He’s used winter test scores to publicize the achievements of his district. The winter assessment is an optional third test that Maine students take, in addition to evaluations in the fall and spring. While the fall and winter tests gauge student progress and can help teachers adapt to specific needs of a class, the spring test indicates whether students have met or exceeded state benchmarks in math, reading and science.
Take the Indian Island School, in Penobscot territory, where Namin has highlighted two data points from winter 2026: “Mathematics proficiency rose from 36% to 49% schoolwide in a single semester”; and 90% of 7th graders “met or exceeded expectations in reading.”
The winter test is not measured against state expectations or benchmarks, and Namin did not explain what proficiency benchmarks he was using.
But using the state’s yardstick — the spring test for which the latest results are from 2025— Indian Island School’s performance has been declining.
In 2023, just over a third of the 50 students there met or surpassed state math expectations, according to data from the Maine Department of Education. The following spring, it was just over a quarter. A year later, spring of 2025, only 16% were proficient in math, according to the state.
And in the state’s reading assessment, about 60% of Indian Island students met state benchmarks over the last three years.
That’s not just 30 percentage points below what Namin reported. It’s 17 students who might be struggling.
Indian Island isn’t alone.
Across all three of the district’s schools, in both reading and math, the superintendent’s selectively highlighted numbers tell one story, while state statistics tell another.
Last year, those schools placed near, if not in, the bottom of the ranks statewide.
“A move from 36 to 26 to 16 percent in math over three years at a school that size can reflect the movement of two or three children as much as any change in instruction,” he said of the Indian Island results.
Namin isn’t wrong about this, said Jennifer Chace, the assistant director of the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation at USM. Chace, who has worked with schools across Maine on a variety of challenges, cautioned that the tribal district’s schoolwide results are too small to draw any sweeping conclusions.
But using grade-level results from the winter test, and ignoring schoolwide results from the spring test (the only one that shows how students perform against state benchmarks) is a double-standard.
Instead, Chace said those results are meaningful to individual students. Even if the trendlines aren’t accurate, the data is telling. And educators and officials should be paying attention to the fact, for example, that 74 out of 96 students at Sipayik Elementary school couldn’t do math up to state standards last year.
Namin furiously defends the performance of students in his district’s schools and the narrative he’s wrung from that even smaller sample size.
“Native students in this country have been misrepresented in the press for generations, most often defined by deficit and rarely by capability,” he wrote, continuing, “When our schools have something to celebrate, we say so plainly and directly to the people it belongs to. That is not spin; it is the correction of a long imbalance.”
He said the winter test scores he released, which exclusively show improvement, “reflects the data we are able to release publicly, and I would ask that you treat it as the complete record for publication.”
The selective choosing of positive indicators sows doubt, according to Chace.
“It shouldn’t be about creating a narrative of success, it should be about creating success,” she said.
Of course, test scores are not everything, and the tribal district isn’t alone.
Maine schools have only recently managed to salvage plummeting test scores and gruntingly push them back up.
And many experts decry a heavily reliance on test scores, arguing that they are an imperfect measure of student learning.
Still, students who go to school generally learn more and perform better on tests.
To that end, the district’s chronic absenteeism scores, which more closely aligned with those reported by the state, are worth celebrating. Data show that significantly fewer students were chronically absent last year compared with previous years.
“Kids who aren’t going to school, by and large, aren’t learning a whole lot,” Chace said.
Getting them in the door is the first step.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Reuben Schafir can be reached at rschafir@pressherald.com.