ODE - come again?

As I am reading through the Academic Content Standards for Language Arts, I found a great deal of information and standards for what a student needs to know, and by what grade level that student should be able to do certain things. I do not object to any of them in fact, I think the ideas and philosophies laid out in this so called "plan" for the success of students from K-12 are pretty good ones.

It says that by the end of K-3, a student should (key word "should") be able to do things like "use context clues to determine the meaning of new vocabulary" and by the end of the 4-7 program a student should (and I stress the keyword "should" here once again) be able to "make meaning through asking and responding to a variety of questions related to text."

All of these benchmarks and philosophies are good ones but the one thought that kept stabbing at my brain was simply,

"okay, I know that teachers, parents and administrators and so on came up with all of these standards....but who decided that THOSE particular people were to be the ones who decided what the content standards would be."

This thought was continuously racing through my mind - WHO chose you to tell me what to teach my students and what they should know by when? I'm just curious...did you draw straws or a piece of paper with your name of out a hat. Jury Duty, got a random phone call from the ODE? I want to know because it's bothering me...

All in all however, I have to say I agree with basically everything lined out in the Academic Content Standards, and while I sit here wondering my life away about who picked these people, at the same time I think it is a great thing to have something to go by, otherwise everyone would just teach whatever they wanted to thus not developing the students minds and putting them much further behind than where they should be