A Review of State Reading and Language Arts Standards. ERIC Digest.

Public demand for improvements in education has motivated a search for guidelines as to what constitutes satisfactory public instruction and learning. One of the latest and most significant manifestations of this has been the efforts within the individual states to define and adopt adequate reading and English language arts standards. This digest poses a series of questions to help review what researchers have found about the ways in which the various states have approached the issue, questions such as: Why Set State Standards for Education? What Have Researchers Concluded about Existing State Standards? How Should, and How Do, State Standards Affect Ways in Which Teachers Teach? What Constitutes Effective English Language Arts Standards? and State Standards: Where Are We Heading? (NKA)