Two more bills have been given a favorable vote in the Ways and Means Committee and passed by the House of Delegates. They are now in the Senate for the second stage of review.
Both bills deal with education, and tracking information needed to meet state and federal reporting guidelines. HB587 – Education – Teacher Identification Number authorizes the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) to assign a unique identification number to each public school teacher. The identification number must be randomly generated and may not provide personally identifiable information. Using this number to match students to teachers by classroom and subject will enable the study of education policy questions.
HB588 – Education – Public Schools – Standardized Course Numbering System is a companion bill to HB587 and authorizes the MSDE to develop a standardized course numbering system to facilitate the collection of data on student participation in courses offered by public schools.
Both of these bills are dependent of a one-time educational grant to MSDE as part of the federal economic stimulus package. Twenty-one states currently have the ability to match teachers to students. Local school systems may adopt the course numbering system on a voluntary basis. If MSDE requires data collection involving course numbers, a local school system that has not adopted the standardized course numbering system must provide a translation between its system’s course numbers and the standardized system.
Both of these bills are a step toward analyzing student progress across the state and determining which courses are most effective in helping our students be successful. The standardizing course numbering system should help when students transfer from one county to another and course work is compared.
3 responses so far ↓
Judy Hall // Mar 31st 2009 at 3:26 pm
Great idea but if this is part of the stimulus package, how many jobs is it providing and for how long? Looks like maybe one and when the grant is done, the person loses its job. They should find other money for this and use the stimulus for what it was meant to do.
Margie Drazba // Mar 31st 2009 at 3:33 pm
Mr. Murphy,
I do not agree with HB587 – teacher identification system. I think it is another bureaucratic rat-hole and could turn into a witch-hunt, so to speak. I don’t know what type of education policy questions could come from this, but it doesn’t appear useful. It is just another “great idea” from one of our state educators.
Peter // Apr 5th 2009 at 7:46 pm
Thank you for your comment. Teacher identification numbers will be used to quantify which forms of teacher training and certification have the greatest impact on students’ academic growth in the classroom. Twenty-one other states are using both of these measures. These are to be randomly selected with no personal information included in the “number”.
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