New Hampshire is particularly interested in getting accurate numbers on dropouts and transfers. Using aggregate numbers, as it always has, New Hampshire can't get the answers to specific questions it needs for policy making. "It looks like data soup," says Lorraine Patusky, director of accountability in the Department of Education. "You can't pick out the carrots and tomatoes and make something different. It's all blended."
When legislators make requests for information, the department has to make its best guess about students. The individual tracking will help the department respond more accurately. And it will relieve the burden on school districts that have to aggregate data over and over each time a different type of information is requested.
To address concerns about privacy and confidentiality, Patusky says the personal ID numbers, assigned to students by algorithm, are not like Social Security numbers that can be tracked to an individual. The only people who can identify the students are school district officials, and they are allowed to do that anyway.
The system, which will take two years to be fully implemented, will be paid for with federal grants. A pilot program in eight schools was completed in September.