Instructional Alignment is Essential for Student Achievement Progress

Comprehensive, end-to-end Alignment at the Knowledge/Skill level from Standards to Classroom Curriculum to Assessments is essential for successfully accomplishing Education's primary Mission - to teach a continuous pipeline of Students a massive but finite list of interrelated Knowledge/Skill items.  To not do the detailed alignment would be like setting up an accounting system, but choosing to make all entries to the nearest thousand dollars – one is guaranteed to have major accuracy issues reconciling budgets and balancing accounts before ever getting started. The lowest common denomination for accounting is 1 cent, and all accounting systems track down to the penny. The lowest denomination in Education is a discrete Knowledge/Skill item. Aligned·By·Design enables using this lowest denomination across all processes for precise, detailed information, and accurate alignment and tracking.

• Creating State Standards is an enormous and complex task, as it's not just listing the thousands of Knowledge and Skill items to be taught, but organizing those lists by factoring in prerequisites, grouping them into Courses, defining Tracks of Courses and cognition levels for different levels of Students, doing cross-subject alignment, vertical alignments, etc. - it's like a massive Sudoku puzzle
• Tracks need to be checked for full coverage of desired items for that level of Student, as well as prerequisites alignment - no Course should have Knowledge/Skills as a prerequisite that isn't in a previous Course on that Track
• If these Standards are not lists of discrete Knowledge/Skill items, there will not only be extra work required by Districts and Teachers to "disaggregate" the Standards into the discrete list of items to Teach, there will also be obvious problems in trying to accurately track them through Educational materials and in trying to Assess exactly which Knowledge and Skill items each Student has and hasn't learned
• Teachers develop Classroom Curriculum - Units, Lesson Plans, Assignments, etc.
  • Classroom Curriculum alignment to the Standards is essential - otherwise there's no way to ensure their materials are imparting the Knowledge/Skill items they are supposed to be Teaching
• Teachers develop Unit Tests, Lesson Plan Tests, Homework, etc. 
  • Alignment of these in-year Assessments is essential - if you're not Assessing each and every Knowledge/Skill item taught, there is no way to determine which Students have learned which items - on which items each Student needs remediation
• End Of Year Assessments - State EOY, NAEP, etc
  • EOY Assessments should test what has been learned based on what has been taught