New Jersey’s Core Curriculum Content Standards (CCCS)

New Jersey’s Core Curriculum Content Standards (CCCS) describe expectations for all students by the end of a variety of grades and in different subjects. They are the road map that guides the development of each district’s curriculum and the State’s standards-based assessments. The cumulative progress indicators (CPIs) break the CCCS into smaller grade groupings to better guide expectations and judge progress. Consequently, the CPIs for each subject and grade are good barometers to assess each student’s progress in the general education curriculum and identify academic strengths and weaknesses.

To assist in this endeavor, the Newark Teachers Union (NTU) organized the CPIs into a checklist for individual student’s expectations, which can assist teachers, parents, students, school-based intervention teams, CST evaluations, and/or IEP teams in identifying academic strengths and/or weaknesses. Teachers, administrators, parents, school-based intervention teams, and special education professionals can utilize the hyperlinked CPI checklists and preschool expectations below to gather information from an array of sources (e.g., classroom participation,  teacher-made and district assessments, New Jersey's standards-based assessments, etc.).  The identified strengths and weaknesses could then be integrated into lesson plans, school-based interventions, special education referrals, evaluations/reports, IEPs, and teaching and learning activities, as the hyperlinked examples of students with reading and math difficulties illustrate. Utilizing NTU's CPI checklists better ensures an alignment between the special education processes with the general education curriculum and state standards, as recommended by the Access Center in this hyperlinked brief.