Dozens of teachers and literacy specialists from across the country hunkered down in Baltimore at round tables, with laptops, pens, and paper, intent on rewriting the collections that wield tremendous influence over the way millions of U.S. children learn literacy skills: the big-name basal readers. Hailing from 18 school districts in 11 states, the group of about 70 came together last month in response to the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts, which demand that students hone their skills at understanding and analyzing a variety of texts. To do that, teachers must help them delve more deeply into what they read. Since most districts lack money for new textbooks, or their states are not scheduled to adopt new ones, the groups decided to bring educators together to write new questions for current materials. The Basal Alignment Project aims to build a free, online repository that will include a bank of teacher-written questions and tasks that are more "text dependent" than those suggested by the publishers; that is, they require students to dig into their readings to respond.