The literacy design collaborative (LDC) was created to support teachers in implementing college and career readiness standards. Teachers work collaboratively with coaches to further develop their expertise and design standards-driven, literacy-rich writing assignments within their existing curriculum across content areas. The current paper reports on early student academic outcome results from a multi-year mixed methods study of the implementation and effect of LDC using a quasi-experimental design, as implemented in one large urban school district. We found LDC had statistically significant effects on Cohort 2 middle school students' English language arts (ELA) performance, an effect size of (d = 0.15) for students receiving LDC instruction in the three core content areas LDC focuses on: ELA, science, and social studies/history.