Maryland 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 — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Maryland College and Career Ready Standards mathematics expectation.
• Science: partial claims, through the shared NGSS file. Maryland was an NGSS lead state and adopted the NGSS verbatim (2013) as the Maryland College and Career-Ready Standards for Science, assessed by the MISA, 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.
• Maryland's nation-strongest executive budget power has no code of its own. The Maryland flagship's headline fact is that the Governor holds what many call the strongest executive budget authority in the nation (the General Assembly can generally only cut, not add). The American Government framework has no indicator naming this Maryland-specific feature; it is claimed here only through GOV.3.3.a (comparing local, state, and national executives), which it fits squarely, rather than as a standard of its own.
• Maryland's referendum-without-initiative has no discrete indicator. Maryland's distinctive citizen tool is a petition to referendum (a veto of a passed law) with NO citizen initiative. The framework names “referendum” only inside the broad citizen-tools objectives (GOV.2.2.c and GOV.6.1.b, whose text is identical), not as a discrete standard; we claim it through GOV.2.5.a (how laws are made) and GOV.6.1.b, and publish the gap here.
• Standard 6.0 (Skills and Processes / the Inquiry Arc) is not separately coded. The catalog's source-literacy method — evaluating a source's authority, origin, context, and corroborative value, and constructing evidence-based arguments — is exactly Maryland's Standard 6.0 inquiry skills, assessed by the Evidence Based Argument Set (EBAS). But the framework prints those as bulleted skills woven through every unit, NOT as GOV.<unit>.<indicator> codes, so there is no code to cite (fetch-a-code-or-don't-cite). The same method is claimed under Maryland's Common Core RH.11-12.6/8/9 (evaluating authors' points of view, premises, and evidence), which ARE coded.
• The Economic, Domestic, and Foreign Policy indicators we checked and rejected. GOV.1.1 (comparing types of government worldwide) and GOV.1.2.a-c/e (English common law to the Enlightenment to the Declaration as named content); GOV.2.2 and GOV.2.3 (parties/interest-groups/lobbyists/PACs, reapportionment/redistricting/gerrymandering); GOV.3.4/3.5 (executive orders and crisis power, and the EPA/FDA/FTC/FCC/FAA regulatory agencies); GOV.4.3 (14th-Amendment due-process incorporation as named doctrine); GOV.5.2-5.4 (GDP/CPI, the business cycle, and fiscal/monetary policy); and GOV.6.2-6.5 and all of GOV.7 (regional policy, entitlements/public-health/education/technology policy, land-use/environmental policy, equity/civil-rights policy, and U.S. foreign policy and international organizations) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, or teach them too thinly to claim, so we do not claim them.
• Maryland's American History, World History, and Geography courses — deferred. The American Government course is one of Maryland's high-school social studies courses. The catalog's commodity, colonial, labor, and civil-rights history and its commodity geography WOULD map to Maryland's High School United States History, World History, and Geography frameworks, as they do in other states, but we mapped the American Government framework this pass and defer the rest (verbatim-or-nothing) rather than cite text we have not transcribed and verified.