America needs excellent and comprehensive K-12 English Language Arts (ELA) instruction. For generations, American classrooms have produced graduates who, on average, possess a steadily shrinking ability to read and write, and a steadily shrinking bank of basic knowledge. Even with the encouraging recent shift towards literacy instruction built upon the Science of Reading and Writing, reading and writing abilities continue to decline. In 2024, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores reached new lows:

Between 2019 and 2024, 4th-grade reading is down (significantly or otherwise) in every state but Louisiana and Alabama. Among 8th graders, fewer than one-in-three students were “pro­ficient” readers. Thirty-three percent were ‘below basic.’

High school graduation rates are dismal, and high school graduates have learned far too little in their ELA classes. College professors have come to expect that new students come into their class­rooms without ever having read a serious book, unable to engage in sustained reading, and unable to write a coherent paragraph, much less a college-level paper.

Flawed state ELA standards bear a significant share of the blame for this failure. State academ­ic content standards are the anchors for K-12 instruction in America’s schools. They prescribe what should be taught at each grade level. They guide teacher education, textbook creation, and state and local assessment. When state standards fail to do their job, they cripple classroom ELA instruction.

The vast majority of America’s state ELA standards are based on the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA). These standards don’t have bad goals, but they provide vaguely worded standards intermingled with a tangle of skills and crosswalks, and were rushed into public use without sufficient testing and evaluation. Too many Americans graduate from high school without ever having read a serious book, unable to engage in sustained reading, and unable to write a coherent paragraph, much less a college-level paper. They also graduate with far too little knowledge of the great works of Western civilization and America’s common culture.

The CCSS-ELA standards, and all the state standards based upon them, don’t work.

That’s why the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and Freedom in Education (FIE) have created The Cather Standards: Model PreK-12 State English Language Arts Standards, named after the great American writer Willa Cather, to inspire America’s state education departments to provide similarly improved ELA standards.

The Cather Standards will prepare our children for college and career because they provide comprehensive content knowledge in ELA. The Cather Standards integrate their content-rich standards with sustained attention to lucidity, practicality, flexibility, and democratic accessibility. The Cather Standards will also educate students to act as informed and confident citizens by acquiring the habits of understanding words, understanding other people, and understanding themselves.

The Cather Standards use current best practices from the Science of Reading and Writing to provide students a rock-solid foundation in literacy instruction. They also incorporate the traditional educational focus on the basic skills of language, reading whole books, engagement with enduring works and ideas, and character formation. The Cather Standards, rigorous and flexible, will provide a benchmark for states that intend to reform their ELA standards so that their high-school graduates are ready for college, career, and citizenship.

The Cather Standards’ straightforward structure makes it easy for teachers to use and easy for parents to hold teachers accountable for how well they teach ELA. The Cather Standards’ intensive content standards and concrete expectations also facilitate reliable assessment, whether by state-level testing or tests by school districts and individual teachers.

The Cather Standards will especially benefit the most disadvantaged students. Disadvantaged students benefit from intensive content instruction even more than better-off students, who receive large amounts of content knowledge from their families and peers. Content standards that abbreviate content foster an unequal society because they especially harm the education of disadvantaged children. The Cather Standards’ intensive content standards fulfill America’s promise of equal educational opportunities for everyone.

ELA standards are the linchpin of state ELA education—they stand halfway between state laws and school district policies, and they have more power to shape American ELA education than any other single document. We absolutely need good state ELA standards—a positive vision of what they should be, and not just a critique of the shortcomings of existing ELA standards. Policy institutes, grassroots organizations, and policymakers all can use them to press the education establishment: Why don’t you teach this?

States and school districts should create ELA standards modeled on the Cather Standards because it teaches American students their heritage of ELA excellence.