The Role: 

The Alignment Specialist at Newsela is primarily responsible for ensuring the alignment of our instructional content to the most up-to-date state and national standards. In this role, you will oversee the strategy for correlating and aligning content and resources to instructional standards, and produce the tools and documentation to track the alignment. Reporting to the Assessment Manager on the Curriculum & Instruction team, you will partner with subject matter experts in curriculum and assessment as well as our customer curricular solutions team to grow Newsela as a best-in-class solution for standards-aligned content.

Why You’ll Love This Role:

You will be the voice of standards alignment at Newsela. You will get to help build the future of education and encourage effective use of Newsela content for targeted instruction by leveraging the ways it addresses standards. You’ll conceptualize and implement new ways of working, and partner with product designers and marketers on how we express standards alignment to customers. You’ll have the opportunity to help us fine-tune our content production process as we scale, and your work will ultimately deliver quality, reliable methods of lesson planning and student progress monitoring to millions of K-12 students and teachers nationwide.

Why We’ll Love You: This is the “job requirements” section; it should accurately capture the scope and level of candidate you’re trying to hire for this role. 

You are deeply knowledgeable of state and national standards in ELA, Science, or Social Studies, including their nomenclature and processes for adoption and implementation. You know which states adopted national standards like CCSS, NGSS, and the C3 Framework. You also know which states did not (or those who adopted and then shifted away) and what provoked those decisions. You can unpack any standard in your sleep. You understand the foundational role standards play in curriculum development, and how the implementation of a conceptual framework varies from that of skills-based standards. You are an excellent communicator, including verbal, written, and interpersonal. You understand the nuance in the way the term “aligned” is used, and can communicate precisely about standards and alignment to a variety of audiences. You have experience providing correlation documentation to reviewers and decision-makers at the state level. While not required, prior teaching experience is a bonus. You are detail-oriented with a flexible, can-do attitude and commitment to scalability. You are also a life-long learner who is passionate about educating others.

About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.