State frameworks aim at what all students can produce. We live in a society where all children need to do well academically. Our communities need, our places of work need it, our economy needs it, our democracy needs it. This is a shift from some student doing very well in school to all students doing well. It means that educators at every level need to examine how much they challenge their students, and especially to look at the gap between how students who are behind are doing and figure out how to help those students catch up and do well.
Standards start the conversation of making education more challenging for everyone.
Standards give us a picture of what students could be learning and what they could do. To raise the level of education, everyone in the community needs to understand and support the standards. Students can use standards to understand what they need to learn and to check against their progress. Parents can use them to understand what their child needs to learn and think about how they can support learning at home. Teachers can use them as a guide in the classroom, and to clarify what a student has learned in the past and what they need to get ready for in future years.