Those who are involved in the current Common Core Standards should buckle up for a rocky ride. Some of the same issues that churned within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) during the standards movement of the 1990s (1989-1997) are here once again. The author's buckle is pulled tight, having already had his standards report ushered out of NCTE's official history (Lindemann), a history declaring first that the standards were "NCTE's largely failed effort" (Alvermann 69), an interesting erasure of the NCTE-International Reading Association (IRA) collaboration, and, second, that "Virtually no one . . . was pleased with the result" (Christenbury 21), an unaudited summary of various score cards. In this article, the author explains why he thinks the IRA/NCTE standards of the 1990s achieved considerable success. He recounts the history of the creation of the standards and the involvement of NCTE in political and government initiatives.