I have to say, the more I dig into the Common Core Standards, the more questions I have. There are impassioned people on both sides of the fence, but I see many, many more angry parents against them. Many cite the abusiveness of the standards. One father invited Arne Duncan to come to his house and watch as his 12 year old son cried over his math homework and called himself stupid because he couldn't solve a math problem that took his tutor, a math professor, twenty minutes to solve.
This sounds like a curriculum problem, not a standards problem. The standard says a child in grade X should be able to solve problem ABC. It does not necessarily say what strategies a child should be taught in order to solve it. That's a choice left to states, school districts, teachers, and curriculum developers. A great many math curriculi(?) out there do a wonderful job of taking simple operations and making them into unintelligible, overly complicated nonsense (particularly ones with the initials EM).
A good example of a bad math strategy we've talked about here recently is partial quotients as a substitute for long division. You won't find "partial quotients" anywhere in the standards.
