The Common Core State Standards, adopted by 45 states, including Missouri and Kansas, call for increasing the ratio of non-fiction to fiction in reading assignments across elementary and secondary school curriculums. An associate professor of urban teacher education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, sj Miller, cautions his teaching students to not let the pendulum swing too far. He sees the new standards potentially at odds with recent wisdom that reading is a more free-ranging exercise in interpretation, unique to each reader each time a text is read.