Good jobs in the nation's twenty-first-century economy require advanced literacy skills such as categorizing, evaluating, and drawing conclusions from written texts. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards by nearly all the states, combined with tough literacy assessments that are now in the offing, will soon reveal that literacy skills of average students fall below international standards and that the gap in literacy skills between students from advantaged and disadvantaged families is huge. The authors offer a plan to help states develop and test programs that improve the quality of teaching, especially in high-poverty schools, and thereby both improve the literacy skills of average students and narrow the literacy gap. [This paper is a collaboration of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. This policy brief is a companion piece to "Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century," a thematic issue of Princeton University and The Brookings Institution's journal, "Future of Children," Volume 22, Number 2, Fall 2012.]