It has little to do with education and leads to meaningless political bickering. Besides, we learn from dedicated teachers, regardless of the specific information they impart. Think of your favorite professor at this school. You probably could have learned the same information from someone else, or from a book or even from our savior, the Internet. At Michigan State, you could have watched the whole thing on television.
Good teachers give students more than information.
That's why national or state curriculum standards, if it were possible to create real ones, wouldn't do any good. Chuck Spencer is an English teacher at my high school. During the four years I was in his classes, he had his own curriculum standards. In writing classes, he taught students how to write formal expository essays. The goal was to get so good at a formal writing style that students wouldn't have trouble knocking off their term papers once they got to college.