New Jersey 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 New Jersey mathematics standard.
• Science: partial claims, through the shared NGSS file. This state adopts the NGSS (see the adoption note above), 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 flagship's distinctive New Jersey structure has mostly no code to cite. New Jersey Civics teaches the deliberately strong Governor (who appoints the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Treasurer rather than voters electing them), the Lieutenant Governor created only in 2010, the appointed judiciary that earns tenure to age 70, the 40-district Legislature on its 2-4-4 Senate cycle, the absence of any citizen initiative, and the 21 counties whose boards were renamed from “Chosen Freeholders” to “county commissioners” in 2020-2021. New Jersey's 2020 standards reach the New Jersey Constitution of 1776 and 1947 (6.1.12.CivicsPI.2.a, .13.a), which the flagship backs, but the strong-governor design, the appointed judiciary, the no-initiative rule, and the county renaming have no New Jersey-specific code. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The Opium Wars, the sugar-vs-other-commodities split, and the War on Drugs. The catalog teaches the Opium Wars and the War on Drugs in depth, and covers sugar thoroughly. New Jersey's world-history standard names sugar and cotton (6.2.12.EconGE.1.a), so we claim the sugar content there — but it does not name the Opium Wars, and New Jersey's Active Citizenship history standards reach contemporary drug policy only through the broad “current foreign policy issue” framing (6.3.12.HistoryCA.12), which the courses do not squarely meet. We leave those unclaimed rather than stretch.
• The Amistad and climate-change teaching mandates. New Jersey law requires the Amistad curriculum (the history of the African slave trade and of African Americans) and climate-change education across subjects. These are instructional mandates layered onto the standards, not separate coded standards, so there is no distinct code to cite; the catalog's slavery, abolition, and climate content is claimed through the coded 6.1/6.2 standards above.
• The wider catalog — health, PE, AI-literacy, and languages. New Jersey's relevant frameworks for these (Comprehensive Health and Physical Education; Computer Science and Design Thinking; World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no New Jersey claims this pass.
• Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS): HS-ESS3-1 New Jersey's Student Learning Standards for Science (2020, and as readopted June 3, 2026) reword HS-ESS3-1 to read ‘and climate change have influenced human activity’ where the NGSS reads ‘and changes in climate have influenced human activity’. Compared 2026-10-06, so we make no New Jersey claim for HS-ESS3-1.