Maryland State Department of Education
state-level department of education for the State of Maryland
Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) is a division of the state government of Maryland in the United States. The agency oversees public school districts, which are 24 local school systems—one for each of Maryland's 23 counties plus one for Baltimore City. Maryland has more than 1,400 public schools in 24 public school systems, with a 2019 enrollment of approximately 900,000. Of the student body, 42% are on FARMS (i.e., qualify for Free And Reduced Meals) and 22% are Title 1 (i.e., schools with high percentages of poor children).
MSDE is led by the state superintendent of schools and receives guidance from the Maryland State Board of Education.
The agency is headquartered in downtown Baltimore at 200 West Baltimore Street (off North Liberty Street/Hopkins Place, just west of Charles Center) in the Nancy Grasmick Building.
The Maryland State Board of Education is responsible for the administration of the Standardized Testing and Reporting programs and the Academic Performance Students Index, which measures the academic performance and growth of schools on a variety of academic measures.
School districts
The largest school districts in Maryland are:
History
1800s
The first superintendent of schools for the State of Maryland was authorized in 1865 by the General Assembly of Maryland under the Maryland Constitution of 1864. The new appointive office continued to be supplemented later with the creation of a State Board of Education to supervise the various levels of activity in public education among the various then-22 counties of Maryland (plus Baltimore City - an independent municipality recognized with the status of a county) which all had widely different situations from the Appalachian Mountains and the Blue Ridge in the Western panhandle to the Chesapeake Bay and adjacent rural counties of the southern portion of the "Free State" to the Potomac River and the Eastern Shore (Delmarva peninsula) to the short North Atlantic Ocean coast. Several different funding levels and growing opportunities for elementary/grammar schools, intermediate/junior high/middle schools, and high schools/secondary education, with Baltimore City (public schools authorized by the state in 1826 and finally opened by the city in 1829 with first four schools (two boys and two girls).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maryland State Department of Education” is state-level department of education for the State of Maryland. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maryland, State and Department, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6781499. VIAF identifies the subject as 168808604. The Library of Congress control number is n80039700. 5 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 1865, 1864 and 1826.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maryland State Department of Education” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.