NATCHEZ — Interim State Superintendent of Education Lynn House told Natchez-Adams parents and educators Monday that new educational standards are an absolute necessity.

House visited Natchez High School Monday evening as part of a series of public meetings around the state to discuss Common Core State Standards.

“Call them what you will, but we have to raise our standards if we want our children to do as well as students in Massachusetts or Connecticut or in some cases contiguous states — the ones that touch us,” House said. “We think we’re putting some things in place that will help us get better, but we’re just not there yet.”

Mississippi adopted the standards in 2010 with the goal of having them fully implemented in kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and math by the 2013-2014 school year.

The standards are expected to be more rigorous and provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn.

House said a frequent misunderstanding of the standards is that they also dictate the curriculum that will be taught in the classroom.

“The Common Core State Standards are a goal; they’re the benchmark we’re trying to achieve,” House said. “How students get there and how teachers teach will vary greatly.

“The folks that are going to determine the curriculum lie within the school and the district.”

House reviewed some of the standard’s goals, which include ensuring students are college- and career-ready, that the expectations are consistent for all students and that the standards are internationally benchmarked.

“We’re no longer competing with the cities and counties around us; we’re competing across the country and across the globe,” House said.

House reviewed differences in what third-grade students are expected to know in math now compared to what they’ll be expected to know in the new standards.

Under the current Mississippi mathematics frameworks, a third-grade student should be able to identify and model representations of fractions including halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths and eighths.

Under the new standards, third-grade students are expected to understand a fraction as a number on the number line and represent fractions on a number line diagram as well as explain equivalence of fractions in special cases, among other things.

“You’ll hear a lot about concepts and conceptual learning and some words we don’t always think about with mathematics,” House said. “They’ll be solving problems and not just answering a question.”

Natchez resident Patty Woods, whose son attends Morgantown Middle School, is a reading and language arts teacher at Jefferson County Elementary School and said the meeting helped her get a better of understanding of what exactly the standards mean for her in the classroom.

“The difference between the curriculum and the standards was the most informative thing to me because I didn’t know that, and I get asked that all the time,” Woods said. “I know I’ll have to work a little harder as a teacher, but I do agree that our kids are not where they need to be.”