The Common Core Standards is a guideline that is provided to ensure that students across the United States are being taught the same topics at the same level. Implementation is done through Local Control of funding. National Education Funding is the incentive to provide rigor. 

One hopes that the Common Core Standards allow for social justice across the United States so that the children of poverty get the same curriculum as a middle class child.

However, the implementation of the Standards has been problematic. Two of the writers of the Common Core were surprised at the backlash that the standards have received. Their perception was that they were designing a guideline of what knowledge each academic grade needed to master so that when the students graduated, they would have a foundation in math that would allow the students to understand math used in college. What the writers of the Common Core did not seem to understand was how the states would measure accountability.

Jason Zimba was featured in National Public Radio was profiled in "The Man Behind Common Core Math." In the article he expresses disappointment that even after four years the New York public school that his daughter attends is subpar in implementation/ teaching math. Basically, just having standards does not make the teaching robust. Other parents are outraged because when their children are tested, the students' scores dip to the 30's in percentile.

Zimba does not seem to blame teachers. He seems to blame the book publishers that create the curricula that the teachers follow.  He said that publishers take old published material and stamp it "Common Core."

The difference between the old Standards and the new focus in the Common Core Standards is that the purpose of the new standards of teaching to understand math, not necessarily to find the correct answer. The old book publishers had not changed the way they presented material.
Also, teacher preparation programs had not changed their focus. 

Dr. Haro is one of the professors who studied the way Japanese teachers taught math and compared them to American teachers. His conclusion was that American teachers teach to find answers while most Japanese teachers use their practice problems, not to solve the problem and get the right answer but to teach mathematical concepts that build on each other. Dr. Haro would like American math teachers to focus teaching for the purpose of learning math, not necessarily for the answers but as a process. He wants teachers to teach the four or five ways that most students will understand the problem, that the problem make sense, and to use the process of math to solve the problem.

It is my understanding that the guidelines are needed to make sure that all the states in the United States are equitable in the way they are teaching math, but the problematic areas are teaching teachers to teach in such a way that math is developed, not just to get the right answers.

The other reasons for the backlash against the common core standards have been that the school districts might not have helped families understand how the standards are going to affect homework. That is to say that parents needed more support and training to help their children with their homework. 

Another problem that the CC standards have is that the assessment used to track accountability by measuring a teacher's effectiveness to the results on the Smarter Balance test.

In conclusion, the Common Core Standards in Math is a guideline that wishes to create a standardized format so that all the students in the United States have a cohesive national guideline in math. Like all tools, the standards are being used in ways that they were not meant to be used.