Assessing and Preparing Students for the 21st Century With Common Core State Standards

I found this reading to be both interesting and a little difficult to understand. The reading discusses the Common Core Standards and how it is used today. Before the current advanced ways of CCSS, "most decisions in the workplace were made at the highest levels and then communicated to lower levels, which limited innovative to creative contributions throughout the chain of command (Leu, Forzani, Burlingame, Kulikowich, Sedransk, Coiro, and Kennedy<--authors)." I found it shocking that CCSS was like this before the current day. What shocked me was that, because employees were at lower levels, they were not required to possess or use higher level of thinking skills or digital literacies, since they simply just followed directions. Why was this a thing? Doesn't that mean that employees at lower levels did not get the same opportunities as higher leveled employees?