Just as workers in the nation have Social Security numbers, students in many states have individual statewide student ID numbers that can be used to track them and possibly identify their academic needs.

Florida has, for about two decades, used a special number that follows a student through school and into the work force.

But Pennsylvania long has been reluctant to keep information on individual students at the state level.

Even the individual results of reading and math tests are off limits to the state. They are held by the contractor, which scores the exams and sends them to the local school districts.

Now, Pennsylvania officials are talking about the idea of a state student identification number as well as other ways to improve the quality of school data.

The pressure comes from the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires the state to keep track of how students are doing. Getting the data right is important because if students aren't doing well enough, schools face sanctions under the act. And it's harder to target help if it's uncertain which student needs what.

Without student ID numbers, said Michael Golden, the state's deputy secretary for information and educational technology, "we're at a disadvantage to be able to create the resources and tools and to consolidate the information about students to help them reach proficiency."

For example, one student could be counted in more than one place without an ID.

"To us, it's not important who that person is. To us, it's just important to understand there is a person and these characteristics, and we need to help that student achieve," Golden said.

Deborah Newby, director for data quality for the Council of Chief State School Officers, said student ID numbers are becoming a necessity, adding that most states have them.

"What's driving it all is instructional improvement," she said. "The more you can zero in on student needs, student performance, and connect it with different aspects, you can start identifying how to improve instruction."

With specific information, she said, "it will make their data systems far more powerful in producing reports not only to satisfy federal and state reporting requirements but to look at instruction."

She said some have concerns about privacy, but "there are methods that states can use to prevent access to the records, to mask the IDs in such a way it would be difficult for somebody to get into a system and identify student-specific information."

She said the systems needed in each state vary, depending in part on how the current systems of data collection are set up.

"It's not a cookie-cutter solution. That means it's not a cheap thing to do," Newby said. "Some states might say we did it for just under $1 million. Others say it takes us $10 million to do it."

Aside from the lack of student ID numbers, Pennsylvania has other problems which hamper its ability to use data effectively to help students.

The state Department of Education requires each school district to file more than 150 reports to more than a dozen subagencies each year, according to Ken Sochats, director of the Visual Information Systems Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Yet those reports often ask the same questions, such as race, but use different definitions and codes for those same questions on different reports, he said. Sochats estimated as much as 75 percent of the information on the reports is repetitive.

Even something as simple as gender may be coded as 'x' or 'y'; male or female; M or F; 1 or 2; 0 or 1; or plus or minus.

The result is a bunch of reports that are time-consuming for school employees to fill out and quite difficult to compare so that information helpful to students can be gleaned.

The center at Pitt is working to improve the quality of data through Project VIPER --Visualizing Information for Pittsburgh Public Schools Evaluation and Research.

With help from both the district and the state Department of Education, the center, which has already produced an atlas of city schools, is working on ways to streamline reports school districts are required to file.The first step is to figure out what is in each report, what the definitions are for each item and how the reports are the same or different.

The center later will develop tools for reaching into the data to get information needed for educational strategies. Such tools, for example, may be able to identify students who are doing well but haven't been tested for the gifted program.

"We're trying to make sure all of our data is comparable and forms a good basis for making decisions," said Sochats.