special correspondent john tulenko of "education week" reports. >> reporter: it takes just 10 minutes to cross through gillette, wyoming. this small city sits in the northeast corner of the state, surrounded by hundreds of miles of prairie. but schools here in campbell county are on the edge of something big: the next generation science standards. >> you are going to build a strand of d.n.a., then you are going to decode it and figure out what that d.n.a. actually says. >> reporter: for christy mathes, at sage valley junior high school, the new standards are about learning to think like a scientist. >> there's a lot of really good stuff in them. every standard is a performance task. it's not, the child needs to memorize these things, it's the student needs to be able to do some pretty intense stuff. we are analyzing, we are critiquing, we are creating, we are actually doing the science. >> reporter: take today's lesson on genes. mathes had her students pick fictional "character cards" with the name, height, hair and eye color of each character. >> this is a secret, just you and your g

special correspondent john tulenko of education week has this report as part of our weekly educationeries, "making the grade". >> reporter: vermont is a collection of small towns, many with just one or two schools, and where people feel they have a say in their children's education. >> people have a very loud voice, you know some people will say montpelier controls everything, there's really not a lot of voice left, well there is. >> reporter: like suzanne hull- parent, vermonters stay close with their schools through their locally elected school boards. there's one for almost every town. >> i've been on the school board for 12 years. i think when you have local people living in the community, making the decisions about their school the best they can, it's going to be more vested in the good of that community. >> reporter: something else about vermont schools, they're among the smallest in the country. >> you get more individual attention. i was blessed to have that and i'm blessed to have my children have that. my daughter feels like she has a voice and i'm not sure in a bigger plac