This study examines the implementation of college- and- career- readiness content standards in Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas through the lens of distributed leadership theory, and determines the affordances and challenges of this distributed leadership through the lens of policy attribute theory. Data sources are 66, hour-long interviews of state and district administrators across the three states collected from Spring 2016 to Spring 2017. Based on distributed leadership and policy attribute theories, state leaders exhibited similar behaviors regarding the distribution of instructional leadership to regional, district, and organizational leaders to add specificity to the CCR standards, at the expense of compromising the consistency and power of the reform. This distribution of leadership is thought to contribute to the authority of the reform, though this authority is made tenuous by the instability of educational policies at the national and state levels. This analysis highlights the need to examine the implementation of education policy using leadership frameworks, and to leadership relationships between the state their regional and district partners. [This article was published in "Educational Administration Quarterly," 2018.]