Illinois standards alignment

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 Illinois Common Core (Illinois Learning Standards) mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Illinois adopted the NGSS verbatim (January 2014) as its science standards, so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. There is no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• Financial Literacy — one rejection, two editions of codes, and the whole history in order. Until 2026-08-28 this entry said Illinois's Economics strand carried a six-standard Financial Literacy sub-strand and that the catalog claimed none of SS.EC.FL.1-6. Two things were wrong with that by then. First, the catalog now teaches one personal-finance course, MONEY-01, on how a consumer credit decision is made. Second, and more seriously, SS.EC.FL.1-6 are the codes of the 2017 printing; ISBE's current document, adopted for implementation in 2022-2023, renumbered the strand to SS.9-12.EC.FL, extended it from six standards to nine, rewrote the text of every one, and prints FL.6 as "No standard." Two of the nine are claimed above, SS.9-12.EC.FL.9 and SS.9-12.EC.FL.4, both as partials with their gaps named. FL.9's mortgage-lending clause, which the credit course could not reach and which this entry previously deferred to a course that did not yet exist, was filled on 2026-08-28 when MONEY-06 (`housing-decisions`) shipped; the standard stays partial because its economic-indicators half is still not taught. The other seven are not claimed. FL.3 is time, interest rates and inflation over a saving lifetime, and FL.5 is diversified investment risk and return; both are outside this catalog. FL.1 (costs and benefits subject to factors outside one's control) and FL.7 (cognitive biases, environmental influences and access to resources in financial decision-making) each contain a clause the course genuinely teaches, the structural constraint on access, but each also asks for a decision-making method the course does not deliver, so they are left unclaimed rather than stretched to a thin partial. FL.2 is information-gathering, planning and budgeting; the course teaches the first and refuses the other two, since it gives no financial advice. FL.8 is risk disposition and opportunity recognition, which the course does not teach at all. FL.6 has no standard to claim. ONE OPEN QUESTION, FILED RATHER THAN GUESSED: only the FL strand was re-fetched this pass, so the SS.CV, SS.EC, SS.G, SS.H and SS.IS codes elsewhere in this file still cite the 2017 document and may have moved in the same revision. That is recorded as a research check rather than assumed either way. MERGED 2026-08-29, AND THIS IS THE PART A TEACHER SHOULD READ. Until then a SECOND Financial Literacy rejection sat beside this one and contradicted it. That entry said Illinois's strand has six standards, that SS.EC.FL.6 is insurance, and that SS.EC.FL.2 and SS.EC.FL.4 are claimed. Under the edition ISBE currently publishes none of those three statements holds: the strand has nine standards, FL.6 is printed "No standard.", and the two claims made against the current numbering are FL.9 and FL.4, not FL.2 and FL.4. Its substance is folded in here instead of being deleted, because the thing it described is real and is still in this file. The Economics framework above carries entries coded SS.EC.FL.2.9-12 and SS.EC.FL.4.9-12, added on 2026-08-28 when MONEY-02 shipped, and those are 2017 codes, consistent with the rest of that framework and inconsistent with this one. Concretely: FL.2 at 2017 numbering (informed financial decisions by collecting information, planning and budgeting) is claimed as a partial on its collecting-information half alone, and FL.4 at 2017 numbering (the costs and benefits of payment options) is claimed as a partial on its payment half, with credit, lenders and interest expressly left to MONEY-01. The four the old entry named as unclaimed at 2017 numbering, and which stay unclaimed, are FL.1 (strategies to increase income), FL.3 (time, interest rates and inflation on saving), FL.5 (diversified investment risk and return) and FL.6 (the costs and benefits of insurance). SO ILLINOIS CURRENTLY SHOWS THE SAME TEACHING TWICE, UNDER TWO EDITIONS OF THE SAME STRAND, and that is not a state of affairs to leave standing: it belongs to the same open question as the rest of the SS.EC codes, and it is deliberately NOT patched here, because moving those two entries means re-reading the whole 2017-cited half of this file against the current document rather than editing two lines. The research check is the place that job is tracked.
• The Illinois Civics flagship's Illinois-specific structure has no Illinois code to cite. Illinois Civics teaches the 1970 Constitution, the plural executive (uniquely both a Comptroller and a Treasurer), the partisan-elected Supreme Court, the uniquely narrow Legislative-Article initiative and the 1980 Cutback Amendment, and one of the nation's strongest home-rule traditions — from Illinois's own official sources. But the 2017 Social Science Standards are DISCIPLINARY CONCEPTS: no standard names a state's structure, so these lessons map only onto the abstract institution and participation standards (SS.CV.1, SS.CV.2, SS.CV.3). The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• Civics standards we checked and rejected. SS.CV.5 (civic dispositions and diverse perspectives as a named concept) and SS.CV.6 (political parties, the media, and public interest groups — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis) are not genuinely taught, so we do not claim them.
• The disciplinary standards we read and did not claim. Across History, Economics, and Geography we claim only the concept standards the catalog genuinely teaches. SS.H.2/4/5/6/11/12, SS.EC.2-4/6-8, and SS.G.1-5/7/9/10 were checked and not claimed — the change-and-continuity, market-mechanics, macroeconomic-indicator, mapping-tool, and culture standards are not this catalog's subject. The reject list is the evidence the map was not padded.