Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001, new versions of state standards connected to annual assessments have become a reality for all involved with education. Teachers and other school district personnel have been charged with interpreting the expectations of NCLB and incorporating them into classroom practice. For many, state standards or grade level expectations (GLEs) now compete with the adopted text for classroom time and attention. In response to this shift, the Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum (CSMC) analyzed standards for more than forty states in the topics of number and operations, algebra, mathematical reasoning, geometry and measurement, and probability and statistics. Here, Horvath et al highlight some issues related to the content of standards in the middle grades (5-2) that emerged from the CSMC's analysis.