In October of 2023, the New Jersey State Board of Education adopted the 2023 New Jersey Student Learning Standards for English Language Arts (NJSLS-ELA) and the 2023 New Jersey Student Learning Standards for Mathematics (NJSLS-Mathematics) to be implemented in September of 2024.
Some updates from the 2016 standards to the 2023 standards include the integration of the Companion Standards into the Reading: Informational Text domain and the Foundational Skills into the Language domain for NJSLS-ELA, and for NJSLS-Mathematics there were slight changes to the Domains and an increase in the number of standards identified as plus (+) standards.
Both NJSLS-ELA and NJSLS-Mathematics now include climate change opportunities for climate change education, indicated with this symbol 
Additionally, while many standards remained unchanged in terms of content, quite a few of those standards saw updates in their indicators.
Along with the release of the 2023 NJSLS-ELA and NJSLS-Mathematics, the New Jersey Department of Education published crosswalk documents to help teachers transfer their 2016 alignments to the 2023 standards. Using these crosswalk documents from the New Jersey DOE, we have put together a crosswalk for Atlas. This allows us to easily change alignments in your Atlas site from the 2016 NJSLS-ELA and NJSLS-Mathematics over to the corresponding 2023 standards.
Your Atlas Account Manager can help you apply this crosswalk to your Atlas site. Once the crosswalk has been applied, any 2016 NJSLS-ELA and NJSLS-Mathematics standards alignments in your Atlas site will be updated to the 2023 versions, following the crosswalk published by the New Jersey DOE. Any alignments to 2016 standards that were not included in the DOE’s documents, or were not a word-for-word match to a 2023 standard, will remain in your courses. Should your school/district elect to do so, your Atlas Account Manager can then help you mark the 2016 versions of the standards “obsolete.” This will leave any remaining 2016 alignments where they are, but they will receive a ⚠ icon to mark them as outdated, and the 2016 standards will no longer be available to add into any courses. (Starting in September 2024, this obsoletion process will be done automatically, following the September 2024 implementation date of the 2023 NJSLS-ELA and NJSLS-Mathematics.)
Note that if your school/district has an Atlas Public Site, the ⚠ icon indicating obsolete standards will not appear there. The ⚠ icon only appears when editing content in Atlas.
Explore how Atlas supports mass standards updates in other New Jersey schools
Angie Rosen
Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Little Silver Public Schools
Atlas substituted the recently 2023 adopted ELA and math standards with the previous 2016 standards for our district. This replacement gave us so much time back and allowed us to use time instead to unpack the standards for clarity, and ensure that they were accurately placed in the correct scope and sequence. ⚠ Triangles placed where standards were deleted gave the teachers the focus to look and find new standards to take their place. (This was especially true for the social studies and science curriculum guides).
In addition, the replacement of the standards with the addition of having ability to document them as T-“targeted”, S-“support”, or I- “Interdisciplinary” gave the teachers a quick way to review the selected standards and ensure that there were not too many as well as making sure that they were marking those standards that are targeted and the focus of the unit.
For more information and support in updating your Atlas site with new and updated standards, contact your Atlas Account Manager.
Additional helpful links from the NJ DOE
ELA
- 2023 NJSLS-ELA (K–12)
- 2023-2016 Crosswalk
- Overview of the 2023 NJ Student Learning Standards for English Language Arts
Mathematics
- 2023 NJSLS-Mathematics (K–12)
- 2023-2016 Crosswalk
- Overview of the 2023 NJ Student Learning Standards for Mathematics Powerpoint (Accessible Version)
About The Author
Hana Kamata
Standards and Services specialist
Faria Education Group
Hana is a Standards and Services specialist at Faria Education Group. She is a former secondary science teacher and utilizes this experience to inform her work in maintaining our Standards database and carrying out curriculum mapping services. She has a passion for technology integration in education and appreciates the opportunity to help fellow educators through her role. Hana earned her bachelor’s degree in Human Physiology and master’s degree in Curriculum and Teaching, both from the University of Oregon.
