Grant Wiggins has a great post about the dangers of breaking the standards down into statements of the finest possible grain size:

This problem of turning everything into “microstandards” is a problem of long standing in education. One might even say it is the original sin in curriculum design. Take a complex whole, divide into the simplest and most reductionist bits, string them together and call it a curriculum. Though well-intentioned, it leads to fractured, boring, and useless learning of superficial bits.

Read also his spirited defense of the standards a couple of days earlier.