North Carolina Goes ALL IN with CASE®
We love celebrating partners who don't just adopt a standard, they build their entire standards ecosystem around it. That's exactly what the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) has done, and their NC Standard Course of Study CASE® publishing instance shows what "all in" really looks like.
Powered by Standards Satchel, NCDPI serves as an official CASE® publisher, meaning the standards are represented as the authoritative, source-of-truth representation of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study, ready for any LMS, SIS, or curriculum tool to import correctly and automatically. The Satchel instance now hosts more than 70 frameworks spanning the full breadth of the Standard Course of Study, from English Language Arts and Mathematics to Career and Technical Education clusters, Health and Physical Education, World Languages, and Student Success standards. Every one of those frameworks lives as structured, CASE-encoded data rather than a static PDF, which means the standards themselves accessible and ready to plug into whatever tools North Carolina's educators, districts, and ed-tech partners are already using.
Accessibility built into the framework, not bolted on
Going ALL IN with CASE® isn't just a publishing decision, it's an accessibility decision. NCDPI has published Spanish-language translations of key frameworks, including English Language Arts, Health Education, Physical Education, World Languages, and Student Success, directly alongside their English counterparts. For multilingual families and educators, that means the standards that define what students should know and be able to do are available in their home language.
NCDPI has also brought their long-standing "unpacked content" into the standards themselves. Unpacking has always been one of NCDPI's most valued resources for teachers. The unpacked content gives a plain-language explanation of what a standard really means a student should know, understand, and do. Rather than leaving that guidance scattered across website links or PDF documents, Supplemental Information like a Glossary, Evidence of Mastery, and Classroom Considerations display right alongside each standard to better enable teacher planning, intervention, and vertical alignment.
Interoperability that goes beyond the framework itself
CASE® associations let NCDPI crosswalk standards to one another, connecting related content across frameworks instead of leaving each set of standards as an island. Those crosswalked associations are the quiet infrastructure that makes true interoperability possible: they're what allow content providers, learning object repositories, and other systems to align resources to North Carolina's standards accurately and at scale, especially when a newly adopted set of standards are pending implementation.
Frameworks, translations, unpacking, and crosswalks, all living together in one accessible, CASE®-encoded home. That's what going ALL IN looks like, and it's a model we hope more state departments and ministries of education will follow.
Congratulations to the entire team at NCDPI for working across content areas to develop coherence, pool your resources, and provide accessible content to your districts! Explore the North Carolina Standards Course of Study - CASE publishing instance for yourself at nc-satchel.commongoodlt.com.
Want your state to be next?
North Carolina joins a growing list of issuing agencies, including Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin, who have become official CASE® publishers. You don't have to be a standards or technology expert to get the ball rolling.
Whether you're a teacher, a district leader, or a state agency staff member, you can be a CASE® Champion by advocating for your issuing agency to publish in CASE®, sharing why it matters with your leadership, or connecting your state department with the resources to get started. Visit commongoodlt.com/casechampion for a toolkit built to help you make the case.
