The Following are how I would summarize sum up some of our National, State and Local Standards:

ESEA 2002 (NCLB)

The Act encourages a closure of the achievement gaps in the academic setting at all levels of education.  This includes the management of federal funding to schools and school systems based on overall performance.

Next Generation Science Standards

This is an update to current standards by showing interconnections of the various science disciplines and other content areas such as mathematics and literary arts.  Additionally, adding critical thinking in terms of design problems as opposed to rehearsed lab experiment with a common result.

Project 2061

Project 2061 wants two things, a common set a knowledge for all students and provide an avenue for a student to pursue their own interests as opposed to a complete “lock-step” of all instructional items.  This is done, in part, by producing a set of benchmarks as oppose to a set circurricula.  This is done by given students the same set of tools, then allowing them develop other tool-sets to generate solutions.

Common Core Standards for Math

Common Core is designed around producing abilities in conjunction with skill sets. Skill sets pertain performing repeatable tasks, i.e. solving equations. Abilities address how to process and analyze a seemly new problem and solving with prior skill sets.

ISTE Standards for Teachers

These standards have teachers incorporate using digital media and platforms and allow student to explore and incorporate these digital outlets to enhance and to drive student experiences in education.

ITEEA Standards for Technology Literacy

Produces standards and a framework to coalesce skills from core classes and apply those skills in a engineering design format.  This allows experience to drive the learning and questioning to dictate what is known and what needs to be determined.

APG and VERSO STEM Education Resources

Provides information on course descriptions and course planning for particular job and career paths.  This resource also shows connection to standards taught in the core classes such as the sciences, mathematics and english.

Virginia 2010 Science & Virginia 2009 Mathematics Standards of Learning

Each site provides information on progression of standards through each grade and core skills that are required for testing.  Additional information such practice tests and prior released SOL items are made available.

Virginia College and Career Readiness Initiative

This initiative was developed to prepare students better to move into both the technical workplace or onto further technical education.  This was developed to fill a need a various technology based industries and productions job and careers.  

Most of us know that math is used not only to torment students, but primarily to help model and make predictions for use in application.  This article, How Particular Accelerator Helped Me Fix My Wi-Fi, discusses and reinforces that mathematics helps a great deal in not only behaviors of plasma, how he used those principles to help with a bit more personal to him, his Wi-Fi connection in his house.  As a side note, he made an app, yes an app, to model signal strength in his "flat" to determine where to put his router, which is also linked in the article.

I was catching up on some articles, and then I ran across something I nearly forgotten about ... ion engines.  This had made news a while back but not much had hit any media outlets, least none that I heard.  I roughly know how the they worked, but nothing more than a curious laymen.  I came across an this article from iflscience.com and now I am going to go back and do more reading on it.  In case you do not click on the link, it is about the Ion engine, the satellite Dawn and the Dwarf Planet Ceres.