“Flu shots here.” Drive by any pharmacy and you’ll see signs promoting the vaccine for this year’s expected strain of influenza. (And later on, we’ll all be expected to line up again to get vaccinated against the H1N1 flu.)

No one expects that this year’s vaccination will protect us against next year’s flu. But, according to a Carnegie Corporation report released last week, we’ve been less clear-eyed about the long-term effectiveness of early-grades literacy instruction.

Make no mistake: U.S. schools have made enormous strides in boosting the reading achievement levels of our youngest students. Carnegie notes, “Not only have fourth grade reading and math scores for U.S. students been rising since 2002, but racial achievement gaps have also in most cases been narrowing.”

But those gains aren’t maintained when students move to the upper grades. Although U.S. students in grade four score among the highest in the world, by grade ten, our students’ reading scores are among the lowest.

Why? Reading instruction, it turns out, is a lot like getting a flu shot. It has to be updated every year.

At the middle and high school level, literacy is a lot more than just decoding words. Students need to learn new words, new facts and new ideas from their reading. And reading their science textbook requires a very different set of skills than reading their history text.

Without those literacy skills, students simply can’t master tough content. In 2006, the ACT reported that of the students who did not meet their college-readiness benchmark in reading, only 16 percent met the benchmark in math.

The Carnegie report, like the Southern Regional Education Board report that preceded it, (and in the interests of full disclosure, I served on the SREB committee preparing that report) both note that without a renewed focus on literacy in the upper grades, students will never reach the higher levels called for in—well, the CCSSO/NGA Common Core Standards (released today) spring to mind.

It’s important to talk about those standards. But unless we first address ways to raise the literacy skills of our students, we may just be taking a shot in the dark.