High-Quality Curriculum

CICS - NORTHTOWN HS

The district has set a goal for all schools to have a high-quality curriculum in place for all grade levels and core subjects by 2026. Ensuring all schools have access to a high-quality curriculum helps create better learning conditions and supports student success.

Standards-Aligned

Curriculum aligns with grade-level standards, in accordance with applicable state and municipal requirements, district foundational frameworks, and research-based best practices. Curriculum supports rigorous learning experiences that are academically, intellectually, and personally challenging.
Horizontally-Aligned Across Instructional and Assessment Materials

The curricular instructional and assessment materials are aligned to ensure a coherent progression from instruction to how students demonstrate knowledge, providing high-quality evidence of student learning that teachers can use to make small, frequent adjustments to accelerate learning. Lesson-level, unit, and interim assessments work in coordination, providing a balanced assessment system to guide students’ learning and teachers’ instruction.
Vertically-Aligned Across Grade Bands

Curriculum is intentionally designed to provide a continuous learning experience and progression of skills and knowledge for students across each grade band: early childhood (PK-2), elementary school (3-5), middle school (6-8), and high school (9-12).
Accessible for All Learners

Curriculum provides teachers with multiple pathways that sequence, scaffold, and accelerate content to ensure that all students are being supported at grade level. Curriculum provides students with differentiated support based on the students’ English language proficiency, and multiple means of engagement, representation, and options for expression.
Supportive of Students’ Social-Emotional Learning

Curriculum is designed to support the development of a classroom community that is inclusive of all students. Curriculum provides teachers with resources to nurture emotional resilience and create an environment where every student feels valued and empowered to succeed.
Culturally Responsive

Curriculum represents the multicultural, multilingual, socioeconomically diverse communities in Chicago, and is intentionally designed to draw on students’ lived experiences. Curriculum promotes students’ identities, cultures, languages, and literacies, and the resources actively draw on these assets as tools of learning. Curriculum is free from bias and inclusive across race, religion, ethnicity, language, ability, sexuality, and gender.

Skyline Curriculum

Skyline is Chicago Public Schools’ universal PreK-12 curriculum, built in partnership with hundreds of CPS teachers. Skyline is available to all district-managed schools in the following subject areas and grade bands:

To ensure the Skyline curriculum remains current and responsive to students, CPS is committed to annual revisions, improvements, and additions to the resources. Each year, a new cohort of teachers and students participate in collaborative feedback sessions where they co-design new resources, provide feedback on existing units and lessons, and inform how Skyline will be further improved to fit their needs. Learn more about curriculum engagement opportunities here.

CPS regularly seeks to partner with local institutions to enrich our curriculum and provide students with engaging, diverse digital learning experiences. External partnerships enable the district to collaborate with renowned institutions in creating engaging and interactive digital learning experiences throughout the Skyline curriculum, and these partnerships enable us to provide localized content that is relevant to our students and their communities. View all of our proud partners here.

SY26 Curriculum Ratings

This table provides information about the quality of curriculum currently being used in School Year 2025-2026 (SY26). Most programs at the school will have a table that lists the curriculum used for each core subject area and grade band within the program. Curriculum can receive one of three ratings: high quality, not high quality, or not yet rated.

No Curriculum Information Available for this School

CICS - NORTHTOWN HS

School-level information on whether students, across all grade levels and subjects, have access to high-quality curriculum that is standards-aligned, rigorous, and culturally responsive.

Skyline Curriculum

SY26 Curriculum Ratings