When people complain about the damage caused by the use of calculators, I imagine similar complaints when the use of the abacus became widespread thousands of years ago. I would guess that none of your readers has used in the last decade the method for finding square roots that I learned in school, and that no one has mourned its loss. We cannot achieve our goals until we determine what they are. There may be disagreement with the current answer to that question, but presumably we should all agree that an answer to that question would be of importance. Standards are important because they describe what we value, those elements of education that we believe are critically important to the child's future.
Standards are important because they can raise expectations for all students.
All students can achieve more than they are now expected to achieve. Teachers and parents get, at best, what they expect. Standards can convey to both teachers and parents the goals that they should set for their children. In New Jersey, the State Board of Education last year adopted standards in seven content areas, and cross-content workplace readiness standards. The mathematics standards provide high achievable standards for all students, and they encourage all students to be continuously challenged and enabled to go as far mathematically as they can.