Having standards at all is good, especially for kids who move a lot. The specifics of the standards are not ideal, but an improvement for most states. Then you have the modules, which are a set of prescribed units and lesson plans which implement the standards and are distributed to teachers. The modules are fucking awful, not evidence based, and were just written by textbook execs (not by curriculum planners or education researchers or even rank-and-file teachers).

Every school can either be an Adapt school or an Adopt school. Adopt schools teach the modules as-planned, page-per-page. Adapt schools receive different funding incentives but have more flexibility in how teachers teach the standards. Some Adapt schools still really hammer away at standardized testing and push the modules anyway, but generally Adapt schools are better.

Edit: also, regarding Common Core and math, the standards focus a lot less on memorizing pen-and-paper algorithms and a lot more on number sense and understanding why things work. So homework often looks more complicated because the skills it’s teaching are simple to hold in your mind, but harder to print on a page.

So not only did they change how math was taught, but most parents today were taught prior to these standards existing. Their kids are learning how to be able to change how they approach math problems without losing intuition, which is the very skill that the many parents trying to help them lack due to years of subpar math education.