This post is the second in a series exploring literacy within education policy and practice. In the first blog , we introduced the major methods of teaching reading in the U.S. — phonics, whole

This month’s highlights: Top News – New national polling from the PIE Network reveals a major gap between parents’ perceptions of student achievement and actual performance data. Missouri Update –

This blog post is the first in a series exploring literacy within education policy and practice. Here, we introduce the major methods of teaching reading and the debates surrounding them

This opinion piece originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . By Eric Syverson, Director of Policy & Research, Aligned. Across the nation, skepticism toward statewide assessment is rising

Money matters. But money alone doesn’t guarantee better results. The Aligned Data Matrix is our education finance data hub that lets you compare funding and student outcomes across Missouri school

This month’s highlights: Top Story — Testing & accountability at a crossroads : what the research says, why it matters now, and how systems should evolve. Missouri Update — Funding Formula

For years, educators have raised a problem with assessments: testing students only after instruction ends, when it’s too late to help them improve. Traditionally, states have used end-of-year exams to

Children who aren’t reading proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school, yet today, about one-third of Kansas students still read below grade level. With Kansas

This week’s highlights: Top News - Although the national test that measures academic achievement may have limitations, the data consistently shows that too many students are not proficient at reading

Following our recent newsletter, some in the education community have raised concerns about our use of NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) data, suggesting that it overstates the number