Hawaii 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:

• The Hawaii Civics flagship's structure lessons have no Hawaii code to cite. Hawaii Civics: How Your State Government Works teaches Hawaii's genuinely distinctive structure — the most centralized state government in the nation (four counties and essentially no city or town governments below them; the ONLY state with a single, statewide public-school system), the Constitution of 1959, a compact elected executive (only the Governor and Lieutenant Governor), a Legislature of 25 senators and 51 representatives, a judiciary where the Judicial Selection Commission (not the voters) decides retention, the elected-trustee Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and Hawaiian as an official second language — from Hawaii's own official sources. But the HCSSS Participation in a Democracy standards are federal/general: they carry NO standard for a state's own government structure. Only the civic-engagement standard (SS.PID.5.7.1) reaches Hawaii's own participation, so the flagship's structure lessons carry no claim while its civic ACTIONS do. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• English/Language Arts — deferred (Hawaii adopted the Common Core, then revised its ELA in 2024). Hawaii adopted the Common Core State Standards for ELA on June 7, 2010, so the shared common-core-ela file would in principle apply. But the Board of Education took committee action on a "Revised Hawaii Common Core Standards for ELA" in April 2024, so Hawaii's current grade 11-12 RH/RI/WHST wording may no longer be verbatim CCSS — exactly the situation that made us transcribe Iowa's and Mississippi's revised ELA rather than alias. We did not fetch and verify Hawaii's current ELA document this pass, and the rule is compare-before-aliasing, so we DEFER the ELA framework rather than blind-alias it. The catalog's source-evaluation and media-literacy work is instead claimed against Hawaii's own social-studies inquiry standards (SS.9-12.2.1, .2.2, .3.1), which we transcribed verbatim.
• Mathematics — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Hawaii Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science: partial claims, through the shared NGSS file. Hawaii adopted the NGSS (February 16, 2016), 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 federal-heavy Participation in a Democracy standards we checked and rejected. SS.PID.1.17.1 (classical, natural-rights, and English-common-law philosophy behind the Constitution), SS.PID.1.11.3 (the Hamilton vs. Jefferson debate on federal strength), SS.PID.4.7.1 (policy makers, interest groups, and the media in shaping public policy — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis), SS.PID.4.10.2 (the economic functions of government and its social services), and SS.PID.4.16.3 (the global role of the United States, geopolitics, and international economics) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, so we do not claim them. The inquiry Anchor 1 (developing compelling and supporting questions) and Anchor 4 (communicating conclusions to a range of audiences) are teaching moves rather than course content here, and are not claimed.
• Hawaii's other high-school social-studies courses — deferred, not denied. The HCSSS also define World History and Culture (CE 1500 to Present), United States History and Government, and Modern History of Hawaiʻi at grades 9-12. The catalog's commodity, colonial, labor, civil-rights, and migration history WOULD map to several of those courses' standards, as it does in other states. We mapped the Participation in a Democracy course this pass (the flagship's home) and DEFER the World History, U.S. History and Government, and Modern History of Hawaiʻi courses to a later pass rather than claim standards we have not yet transcribed and verified.