Now this is interesting, and alarming, and confusing - all at the same time!

In England they are abandoning their national standards and having schools develop local standards.

And here, we are attempting to develop national standards... and abandon state standards.

Standards help when you have kids moving from school to school every year and, sometimes, within a school year. (I moved between countries and that was really confusing.)

But I don't think that standards is the end all and be all.
From my perch - we need to stop stressing kids, parents need to grow up and we need to make sure kids know basics. You can't have a child working to the standard of deconstructing a novel when they can't bloody read the novel...