Education Standards (Cont'd)
In the post below, I pointed to news of proposed national standards in K-12 education. You can read a draft of the proposals here. They are organized in a progressive format with 10 core college-ready goals to be achieved by graduation. Each grade has a step along the way toward those goals. For example, here are the reading standards for kindergarten.

1. With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about details and events in a text.

2. Retell familiar stories.

3. Identify characters, settings, and key events in a story.

4. Ask questions about unknown words in a text.

5. Recognize common types of texts (e.g., storybooks, poems).

6. Name the author and illustrator of a text and define the role of each.

7. Relate pictures and illustrations to the overall story in which they appear.

8. (Not applicable to literature)

9. Compare and contrast the adventures of characters in familiar stories.

10. Read emergent-reader literature texts with purpose and understanding.

(Notice that #8, which corresponds to the college-ready goal of "Delineate and evaluate the reasoning and rhetoric within a text, including assessing whether the evidence provided is relevant and sufficient to support the text’s claims." does not have a kindergarten equivalent.)