Sue Pimentel of StandardsWork gives advice about creating standards and assesments:
1) Ask up front about non-negotiables.
2) Pay attention to how you're going to assess--what's reliably observable. It's easy to get a group of people together and they start to codify what already is and talk about their students and say we can't ask more from our students because they can't even do what we're already asking them to do
3) It's important not to make this a consensus-driven process.