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It's simple, really.
But you have to keep the issues separate. There's the issue of having standards; of where to set their "rigor" or difficulty, what to include; there's the question of how to test that they're being taught; and there's the question of what use to make of that test beyond just being a diagnostic.
You asked about standards. They're crucial.
There are two main uses for standards. One is to set minimums. The other, to set high goals.
The first is useful for IDing gross inequality, either between schools or between cohorts or teachers within a school. Black schools are more often failing? Unless you have a test to compare black schools with white schools, you've got no proof. Unless you know both schools are supposed to be teaching the same things, you've got no basis for a test.
Standards allow a test that can identify inequality. When you hear about race/ethnic differences in educational achievement, you're talking standardized tests and that means you're crucially relying on standards. Progressives/liberals drove this agenda.
The second keeps students and schools working as hard as they can. It's easy to slack off. Even if you have a scope and sequence, unless it can be enforced it's not much of a standards. You want that high school to push its students, set high standards and make sure that they're enforced or at least diagnosed.
You must never confuse these kinds of standards. Which means, politicians routinely confuse them in their speech. (I don't know which is worse--assuming they're too stupid and really do confuse them, or if they know they're different and just want to manipulate us.)
If you test the first, you've got a minimum standards test. That's useful for spotting failing schools. It's useful for graduation. Johnny can't read, Johnny doesn't pass the test--whatever his teachers say. Raising these standards when a lot of kids can't pass the test is foolishness. Ravitch is right. But the second kind of standard is damned useful. As long as you use them right, the sky's the limit for those. You want to put LaPlace transforms in pre-calc, go for it. You may never get there; but perhaps one class in 1000 will.
Tests based on the second kind of standards are useful if they're diagnostic. Not if every student must meet them. At my school, we're told to stick to the scope and sequence and every few weeks there's a test--if we get a week behind, then students won't have seen 1/3 to 1/4 of the material on the test. One teacher said she got 3 weeks behind and the students hadn't seen *anything* on that test. That's a bad use of such a test. However, from this test we also know which standards we failed to teach well enough to which kids. We could reteach them. That's useful.
Tests based on the second standards are also great for comparing schools or teachers. My kids score lower on the test but have a higher class average? I grade too easy. My school's graduates scored 30% lower than another school's? Ouch.
And, in theory, if we get our collective acts together such tests could point to when minimum standards should be raised and by how much.
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There have been, for decades, industry/field-specific standards. They're intended to give states advice. National politicans like them because they can claim power over state educational systems. Sometimes it's nice to think that Texas and New Hampshire have the same standards. Sometimes it's pointless. Sometimes it's scary.
I think the national science standards are insane. Absurd. Wrong-headed. I'd seriously think of getting certified to teach English if I thought they'd be implemented at my school.
Then again, I think the Texas standards for chemistry and physics are workable. The chemistry allows for depth (even if it's not tested, so few push for depth). A typical college freshman chem course covers more topics in more depth. The physics standards are ambiguous but ambitious--a typical 1-year college physics course covers all the same topics. In high school, that means a pretty superficial discussion of each topic. Still, this shows the kind of trade off that states should be allowed to make. Few topics, in depth; many topics, shallow.
The thing is, that foisting standards and tying their acceptance and achievement to money gives politicans and bureaucrats power. And if there's one thing that both want, it's power. They know what's best--even if what they know today is at odds with what they knew last week--and how dare anybody tell them otherwise.
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Now for my rant. The problem with standards is that we confuse them, and we confuse them out of fear. We're afraid that other countries students are smarter, that their best trumps our best.
Finland's one example. Singapore. S. Korea. Whatever. The problem is that we don't get honest comparisons. Moreover, our systems have different goals so it's not possible to obtain honest comparisons. (In other words, we don't have common standards 
Finland has a vocational and a technical track. Early in high school kids are removed from high school for vocational programs if they don't do well on a test and their teachers recommend them for it. Their "high school cohort" is a subset of high-school-age kids with all the academically low-achievers pulled out. Our high school cohort is all the kids of high school age. Most countries do as Finland does. The numbers with the US aren't comparable. Of course Finland scores higher--they've dumped their bottom 30% of students.
A lot of countries also have students that trump our best, highest-achieving high schoolers. Then again, they focus on the top students to help them--teachers with greater expertise, more time, and more money devoted to the high achievers. We lump our high achievers in with others, too often, and their teachers are pressed for time and resources. Want to do a chemistry project in my school? Cough up funds, I'll try to find time for you between meetings and teaching 180 kids. Want to do one in a Finnish school? Sure--I'll get you the supplies and, gee, I get time freed up to work with you.
And that's the difference between the educational mission. We're all about "leave no child behind." We've tripled ed spending, in real dollars, in the last 40 years. Where Finland frees up time and money to help the high achievers achieve more, we free up serious time and money to help the kids who, after they scrape through high school, will get minimum wage jobs or be unemployed. We help the top 10% as long as it's not too expensive or if it somehow is good for PR.
First, it (the "movement" suggests that education and educators didn't HAVE standards before the "movement."
Wrong, of course. We did. They just weren't horrifically long laundry lists of isolated skills that we were held "accountable" for so that we could be punished and diminished.
We had frameworks. Remember those? They gave a general scope and sequence of what was to be learned at each grade level. There was no mandated test; we taught, and students were responsible for the learning.
Those standards and that movement make it possible to insert high-stakes testing into the system, and use that high-stakes testing to control, discredit, demean, and ultimately destroy that system.
It started a couple of decades ago, at the state level in many states. In CA, where I was teaching at the time, we had the API. We were suddenly expected to keep a document, to be turned in at the beginning and end of every term, that listed all the dates we taught each individual standard; the time spent testing increased tenfold, and we began to lose autonomy in our classrooms.
At the time, I talked to one of my former professors, who was our head district psychologist, about it. He taught the "psychological measurement" course I took that focused on standardized testing. I asked him if it were really statistically possible for any teacher, school, or district to meet the test score mandates in the new laws, because, based on the class he taught me, it was statistically impossible. He told me I was right. Before the movement even went national with NCLB.
We KNEW this before it even got off the ground.
That's how I explain the standards movement without reading the link.
Having read the link, I'll say that one of the things we learned in the above mentioned course was that the most reliable predictor of any standardized academic test's results was parent income and education level.
Ravitch nails this repeatedly.
In a culture that's become immune to fact, standing defiantly on the right to "believe" whatever about any topic, pointing out reality, pointing out truth, pointing out FACT, has become irrelevant to the discussion.
