Ten years have passed since the publication of national standards documents in social studies subjects. Many disciplines are considering revising or updating their standards work. In the meantime, states and local school districts are preparing to revise their social studies curriculum frameworks to articulate for the provisions of No Child Left Behind. In this article, the authors make suggestions to national standards writers in the social studies that might make their second-generation efforts more useful. As others have demonstrated (Cohen 1990; Saxe et al. 1999; Bednarz 2003; Boehm, Rutherford, and Foster 2003), actual implementation of either the form or function of disciplinary standards is frequently much less than the authors of the standards had envisioned. To make a second round of standards writing more useful, the authors suggestions can serve to help make revised standards a better fit with the efforts of states that are engaged in curriculum revision and provide a closer link between the content and skills that the best minds in each discipline think are important and what each state or local school district asks its teachers to teach and its students to learn.