State of New Jersey Department of Education

Content Standards Overview - What are Standards

Good teachers have standards in mind when they set their lessons up, where the idea of a "standard" represents a specific idea of what the teacher expects a student to recall, replicate, manipulate, understand, or demonstrate at some point down the road - and of how the teacher will know how close a student has come to meeting that standard.  Standards, in other words, are conceptually nothing new - but they did receive a new emphasis over the last decade, through various state  initiatives ...
Developing Educational Standards

What Do We Mean by "High Standards for All Students"? from the US Education Department (US ED)
Kentucky, California, Vermont, and other states [NJ] are reorienting their school systems around this challenge. They're trying to move all children, not just a few, toward high standards of academic learning.