Speaking as someone who parses Diane Ravitch's site daily I'd disagree a bit with that characterization. The common core standards were written by an idiosyncratic small group of experts mostly hand picked by the Gates Foundation rather than a systematic or representative group of accepted leaders in the fields affected. The process was also mostly opaque and did not have an adequate revision process. See:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2009/07/national_standards_process_ign.html

On top of that, despite from the outside the idea that in the abstract early learning is a non-contentious subject, there are a ton of long standing battles over from constuctivism in math to close reading/phonics in language arts. Its very possible to examine them solely from the pedagogical standpoint and find serious criticisms.

For example: http://danielskatz.net/2014/09/19/dear-common-core-english-standards-can-we-talk/