Pared down standards, according to ASCD author Mike Schmoker, are the cure to the Common Core. In this provocative article, Schmoker describes how the Common Core literacy standards have largely been a "disaster"--their tangled implementation "an impossible profusion of grade-by-grade minutiae." To "right the ship of literacy," schools must get back to the basics, he explains. "All students should engage in unprecedented amounts of purposeful reading, discussion, and writing every day, across the curriculum." Here, Schmoker provides a framework for making that happen.