SB-140 aims to match quality instructors with challenged kids

A Republican effort to someday draw the best teachers in the state to the most problematic districts and schools with the most at-risk children got rave reviews from a wide range of education advocates in a Senate committee Thursday.

Senate Bill 140, authored by Assistant Minority Leader Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, will not face a vote by the Senate Education Committee until next week.

SB-140 would set in motion the first systematic attempt to find out who quality teachers are and then chart their movement throughout the education system. The bill establishes a commission that will analyze the teacher gap and implement a “unique teacher identifier” system by 2009.

“The end result would be to place teachers who are most effective with lower-producing kids,” said Spence. “We want local school districts to have the best data on teacher qualifications, and show how they were trained.”

The identifier system would include a cross-section of existing and emerging databases that would provide the information needed to track teachers, and it also would involve a unique form of identification that is permanently attached to each individual teacher, similar to a Social Security number.

Supporting Spence’s proposal was education professional Julie O’Brien, director of Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers. She noted that the absence of a teacher-ID network equates to a gap in the overall education system.

“If we can’t measure things going on in a classroom, then we’re at a disadvantage,” O’Brien said. “In some districts, you can’t determine which teachers are moving kids.”

Sen. Suzanne Williams, D-Aurora, suggested that she was “struggling” with the format of SB-140.

“I think it would be insufficient in monitoring the effectiveness of teachers,” she said.

However, Spence contended, “Our current system of tracking teachers is in the dark ages. They only get a new (tracking) number every five years when they recertify.”

According to the National Center for Educational Accountability, 14 states have an operational teacher identifier system with a mechanism to link teachers and students. The Alliance for Quality Teaching has been studying how some of those other states have developed their identifier systems.