Hmm. I see what you're saying. But my middle class public school system in NYS spends a lot of time teaching us about the standards and very, very, very little time improving how any of us at the K-5 level are actually teaching. It's not how I'd run a school. Passing kids along without teaching them much of anything or expecting results does certainly seem to be a thing. But I suspect such focus on the standards would be a thing of the past if everyone actually knew how to teach their subject very, very well. For example, if I were hiring a reading teacher (or even a classroom teacher) at the primary level, I'd ask this simple and relatively easy question: If you had absolutely no resources in your classroom but a chalkboard and a piece of chalk, with no access whatsoever to books of any kind, how would you teach a classroom of 5-6 year olds how to read? How would you teach them to write? To do math? If they're stumped, then they don't understand the developmental scope and sequence of teaching children that must basic of all skills. You can talk about standards till you're blue in the face. But you'd be like a factory inspector yelling at your workers: "C'mon, just make the widgets better!" It ain't happening.