One must wonder if critics of the Common Core curriculum have actually read the standards proposed for public education.
I've read the ones for English Language Arts for high school and find them excellent. They mandate the teaching of skills that I use every day and have throughout my life. They would not detract from studying the full canon of English literature, but mandate the inclusion of pertinent literature in other classes, such as those in the physical sciences, social sciences and history.
The real question is not the standards, but their implementation. These standards imply teaching at a much deeper level than in the past. Unfortunately, the training material on the state's website is not encouraging. It seems to trivialize the implementation to text analysis without the kind of deeper integration that would make these standards effective. It also counsels against letting students integrate information from other sources, since that would "privilege" superior students.
The bottom line is that these standards will probably not make much difference in how well Tennessee students learn. To do that, we would need a different class of teachers, ones rigorously trained in intellectual disciplines, with the disciplinary confidence to apply these standards.