California standards alignment

• CCSS.Math.Content.HSS-IC.B.6

  Covered

  Evaluate reports based on data.

  Covered by

  • How to Read a Number: Statistics for Citizens
  • Intro to Citizen Science

  • · 1 · The four questions
  • · 8 · Where the number came from
  • · 16 · Capstone: take a number apart
  • · 8 · Recording data so future-you can use it
  • · 9 · Error, uncertainty, and how precise to be

  Note: Cluster: Make inferences and justify conclusions from sample surveys, experiments, and observational studies. The strongest mathematics alignment in this catalog: the standard is a single sentence describing evaluation rather than computation, and evaluating a public report against its own evidence is the whole of How to Read a Number, whose capstone requires the learner to do it on a real published number and write the honest version of the sentence it appeared in. Intro to Citizen Science reaches the same standard from the other side, evaluating a report you produced yourself.

• CCSS.Math.Content.HSS-ID.C.9

  Covered

  Distinguish between correlation and causation.

  Covered by

  • How to Read a Number: Statistics for Citizens
  • Intro to Citizen Science

  • · 11 · Correlation and causation
  • · 12 · Knowledge check: what is hidden, and what polls can say
  • · 6 · The confounder
  • · 3 · What you can measure vs what you care about

  Note: Cluster: Interpret linear models. Taught twice, deliberately, from both sides. How to Read a Number lesson 11 is the READING side: four competing explanations for two things moving together, and what actually establishes causation. Intro to Citizen Science lesson 6 is the COLLECTING side, working six candidate confounders through one relationship, several of which are ways the measurement responds rather than ways the world does.

• CCSS.Math.Content.HSS-IC.B.3

  Covered

  Recognize the purposes of and differences among sample surveys, experiments, and observational studies; explain how randomization relates to each.

  Covered by

  • Intro to Citizen Science

  • · 1 · What citizen science is, and what it is not
  • · 5 · Where and when you look decides what you find
  • · 7 · Controls and baselines without a laboratory
  • · 13 · Capstone: design a study you could actually run

  Note: Intro to Citizen Science owns this one. Lesson 1 names the three kinds and states the consequence that matters to a volunteer: nearly all citizen science is a survey or an observational study, almost never an experiment, and that ceiling decides what the data will ever be able to say. Lessons 5 and 7 develop how randomisation relates to each and what is available when you cannot randomise.

• CCSS.Math.Content.HSN-Q.A.3

  Covered

  Choose a level of accuracy appropriate to limitations on measurement when reporting quantities.

  Covered by

  • How to Read a Number: Statistics for Citizens
  • Intro to Citizen Science

  • · 3 · Percent, percentage point, and percent change
  • · 8 · Where the number came from
  • · 9 · What a margin of error actually covers
  • · 8 · Recording data so future-you can use it
  • · 9 · Error, uncertainty, and how precise to be

  Note: A judgment rather than a computation, which is why a course that grades no arithmetic can claim it honestly. In How to Read a Number, lesson 8 separates a census from a sample estimate from a projection and refuses to quote a revisable figure without its release, and lesson 9 establishes that a stated margin of error is a lower bound on uncertainty. Intro to Citizen Science lesson 9 makes it a rule the learner applies to their own data: a derived number cannot be more precise than its roughest input.

What we don't claim

A standards page is only worth reading if the omissions are honest too. We looked at these and left them out:

• Mathematics — the interpret-it standards only, and never the produce-it ones. One course, How to Read a Number, teaches the reading of published quantities: provenance, denominators, what a summary discarded, what a margin of error covers, correlation against causation, and the arithmetic of representation. It grades no arithmetic. Every assessment is scenario multiple-choice or a click-to-reveal self-check, and the learner is never asked to produce a number. So we claim the standards about interpreting and evaluating data, and we do NOT claim S-ID.1, S-ID.4, S-ID.6, S-ID.8, S-IC.2, S-IC.4 or S-IC.5, every one of which requires the student to construct a plot, fit a model, compute a correlation coefficient, run a simulation, or develop a margin of error. A course that never asks for those cannot claim them. If your mathematics requirement is assessed on students producing statistical work, this contributes to it and does not discharge it. We also claim nothing in algebra, functions, geometry or probability, because we teach none of it.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. California adopted the NGSS verbatim (September 4, 2013), so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. We verified California's edits document: it touches seven clarification statements, none of them HS-ESS3-1. There is no laboratory work, no investigation, and no modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• The California Civics flagship's structure lessons have mostly no California code to cite. California Civics: How Your State Government Works teaches the 1879 constitution, the plural executive (a Lieutenant Governor elected separately from the Governor), the 120-seat Legislature, the top-two primary, and AB 37's universal mail ballots — from California's own official sources. But the 1998 Principles of American Democracy standards are overwhelmingly FEDERAL: state government enters only through the comparative 12.7 standards (lawmaking, courts, local responsibilities — which the course backs) and direct democracy through 12.6.5. The plural executive, the Legislature's shape, and California's election on-ramps have no code to cite. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The Great Migration — California's 1998 standards never name it. An entire course teaches the Great Migration, but the 1998 document contains no standard on it: 11.2's rural-to-urban migration is the European-immigration industrial city, and 11.10.5's civil-rights diffusion names the churches, not the Migration. The Migration's content maps only where the standards name its people and politics (11.10.1, 11.10.4). The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• 10.2's named revolutions exclude Haiti. Our deep revolution is the Haitian Revolution — taught through to the 1825 indemnity. California's 10.2 compares the Glorious, American, and French Revolutions, and its philosopher list reaches Latin America only through Bolívar; Haiti is not named anywhere in the document. We do not stretch adjacency into coverage, so 10.2 is not claimed.
• Most of the Grade 12 civics standards we checked. 12.1.1-12.1.4 (the political-philosophy genealogy and the Federalist Papers as texts), 12.2.2 (economic rights), 12.2.5 (reciprocity of rights and obligations as a named concept), 12.3.1-12.3.4 (civil society), 12.4.3 (identify your current representatives — a live exercise our courses prompt but do not assess), 12.5.2 (judicial activism versus restraint), 12.5.4 (the civil-rights controversy case list), 12.6.1/12.6.3 (party history, polls and campaign funding), 12.7.1/12.7.5/12.7.8 (intergovernmental conflict resolution, public-policy formation, presidential case studies), 12.8.1-12.8.3 (media influence on political life — our media-literacy course is consumer protection, not political media analysis), and 12.9.1-12.9.6/12.9.8 (comparative systems beyond the Poland standard) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, so we do not claim them.
• Economics standards we checked and rejected — and no economic-systems home. All of Econ 12.1 (scarcity, opportunity cost, incentives as named concepts), 12.2.1/12.2.3-12.2.10 (market mechanics as a unit), 12.3 (fiscal and monetary policy), 12.4.2/12.4.3 (the current labor market and wage theory), and 12.5 (macroeconomic measurement) are not genuinely taught. The reciprocity-versus-market-economies content — taught directly and at length — has no home either: California's 1998 economics section contains no comparative-economic-systems standard (12.9.1 in the civics section touches economic philosophies, but as regime ideology, which our courses reach only for Poland). The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• Health content areas beyond Personal and Community Health. Nutrition and Physical Activity, Growth/Development and Sexual Health, Injury Prevention and Safety, Alcohol/Tobacco/Other Drugs, and Mental/Emotional/Social Health were checked against the grades 9-12 standards and are not genuinely taught by these courses. The BVC drug-history curriculum teaches the HISTORY and policy of substances, not the health-behavior content the ATOD standards ask for (e.g., 1.1.A's health benefits of abstaining), so it claims nothing there.
• PE performance and participation standards — and no technology standard to cite. Every Course 1 and Course 2 standard that asks a student to DEMONSTRATE movement, PARTICIPATE in activity, or achieve measured fitness levels (all of Standard 1's performance halves, 2.1-2.3, 2.5, and the Standard 3 self-responsibility-in-activity outcomes) is out of reach of an online course; we claim knowledge- and planning-side standards only. And unlike Arizona (S3.H2.L2) and Arkansas (PFL.3.3), California's 2005 document predates wearables and has no technology-for-activity standard — so our tracker course's strongest PE claim has no California code. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. California's closest frameworks (Computer Science, World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no California claims this pass.