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Missouri’s Teacher Supply Hourglass: Why the Missing Middle Matters
This blog provides an overview of Aligned’s Missouri’s Classroom Teacher Experience Series, a three-part analysis examining how shifts in experience, placement, and credentials are reshaping the state’s educator pipeline. Over the next three weeks, we will release the full reports…
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Kansas Legislature passes state budget
This analysis originally appeared in Aligned’s weekly newsletter, where we track key education and workforce policy developments across Kansas and Missouri. Subscribe to get these updates delivered directly to your inbox. Late Thursday night into earlier this morning, the Kansas Senate (23-16) and House of…
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Kansas Enacts Statewide Cell Phone Policy
Kansas’ student cell phone legislation has become law, ultimately moving forward through a different vehicle. After additional negotiations, the Senate’s policy approach in SB 302 was incorporated into Senate Substitute for Substitute for House Bill 2299, which is now law. The final bill…
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Missouri School Funding: Rebuild or Patch?
This analysis first appeared in Aligned’s most recent weekly newsletter. We’re expanding it here to add context on the tradeoffs the Missouri School Funding Modernization Task Force is weighing as it works toward recommendations due to Governor Mike Kehoe by…
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A Closer Look at Early Literacy in Kansas and Missouri
This post continues our series on literacy policy and practice. Earlier entries traced how reading instruction evolved in the U.S. and why the science of reading has regained prominence. Here, we turn to what the data shows in Kansas and…
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Webinar: Literacy, Data, and the Science of Reading
On November 12, 2025, Aligned hosted a webinar examining how Kansas and Missouri are translating the “science of reading” into policy and practice. The session walked through recent reading data, what research says about effective early literacy instruction, and how current laws…
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Kansas Requests Federal Waiver to Unify School Accountability Systems
On Monday, October 27, Kansas joined the increasing number of states seeking to waive certain requirements of federal education law. Specifically, the waiver seeks to make a unified accountability system, merging the current state and federal systems into one within four years. This…
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A Brief History of Literacy Instruction in America
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 language, balanced literacy, and sight word memorization. Here,…
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2025 Kansas Cradle to Career Listening Tour
At Aligned, we believe Kansas thrives when education and workforce systems work together. That belief guided us this year as we launched the Kansas Cradle to Career Listening Tour, a chance to step into communities to hear directly from Kansans about…
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How We Teach Literacy
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. Understanding these approaches — what they are, how they work,…
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Op-ed: Why standardized testing still matters in Missouri
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. Teachers and families increasingly question whether traditional testing supports learning or just consumes valuable instructional…
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Webinar: Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems
On September 10, 2025, Aligned partnered with the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) to host a webinar introducing Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDSs) and their role in aligning education and workforce priorities. SLDSs help states connect data across systems, inform policy, and provide valuable…
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Access nonpartisan research and news about the policies shaping education in Kansas and Missouri.