California standards alignment

• 5-LS2-1

  Partially covered

  Develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment.

  Covered by

  • Manure and Compost

  • · 1 · What a loop is, and the two rules this course reads
  • · 9 · What composting is: carbon, nitrogen, water and air
  • · 22 · Build your own loop

  What we do and don't cover: The capstone (lesson 22, an assignment the learner submits and an instructor grades) has the learner develop exactly this model for their own ground: boxes for plants, animals, decomposers and soil, arrows labelled with the matter each carries, and the leaks out of the system. PARTIAL because the clarification statement's emphasis, that plants change matter that is not food (air, water) into food, is not taught: the course follows decomposed material back into soil and crops, not photosynthesis.

• MS-LS2-3

  Partially covered

  Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.

  Covered by

  • Manure and Compost

  • · 1 · What a loop is, and the two rules this course reads
  • · 9 · What composting is: carbon, nitrogen, water and air
  • · 22 · Build your own loop

  What we do and don't cover: Matter cycling among animals, microbes, soil and crops is taught directly, and the capstone (an instructor-graded assignment) has the learner build the model and define the boundary of their own system, as the clarification statement asks. PARTIAL because energy flow appears only as the heat a compost pile gives off; there is no treatment of energy moving through an ecosystem.

• HS-LS2-3

  Partially covered

  Construct and revise an explanation based on evidence for the cycling of matter and flow of energy in aerobic and anaerobic conditions.

  Covered by

  • Manure and Compost

  • · 9 · What composting is: carbon, nitrogen, water and air
  • · 10 · Heat, oxygen and time: the stages of a pile
  • · 12 · Turning, cold heaps, and worms

  What we do and don't cover: Composting is taught as aerobic decomposition, and the learner reads temperature evidence to tell a working aerobic pile from cold zones the NRCS composting chapter calls likely sites of anaerobic decomposition. PARTIAL because the course stops at that evidence: it does not teach aerobic or anaerobic respiration as processes (which the assessment boundary also excludes at the chemical level) and treats energy only as pile temperature.

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: partial claims, through the shared NGSS file. California adopted the NGSS verbatim (September 4, 2013), so our science claims come through the shared NGSS mapping, each partial and with its limit stated on the entry; any NGSS code this state rewords or dropped is listed separately on this page. There is no laboratory work or investigation in this catalog, and we claim no more than the lessons teach.
• 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.