Standards for Primary-Grade Reading: An Analysis of State Frameworks

The purpose of this article is to analyze state standards for early reading/language arts from 2 perspectives-what is known about standards and what is known about early reading. Guided by criteria that address equity, content, and specificity established by the Council of Chief State School Officers in collaboration with 9 other educational organizations, we analyzed the standards of 42 states with an emphasis on a subset of 14 documents that provide grade-by-grade information for grades K-3. The analyses revealed that (1) documents that do not provide standards for each grade miss important content that is unique to K-3 levels, (2) benchmarks/objectives vary along a continuum from very general to highly specific, (3) documents vary in the ways in which they conceptualize and organize the area of reading, (4) many documents do not provide a viable curricular path across grade levels, and (5) some documents include content inappropriate for certain grade levels and/or ignore important content. The implications of these results for the development of local systems of curriculum, instruction, and assessment are discussed.