Washington, D.C. standards alignment

• HS-ESS2-2

  Partially covered

  Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth's surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth systems.

  Covered by

  • The River and the Watershed

  • · 2 · Where a river's water comes from
  • · 6 · Sediment, and what a dam does to it
  • · 9 · Why the oxygen runs out
  • · 10 · A thousand miles of nitrogen

  What we do and don't cover: The best NGSS fit in the catalog for a feedback argument. The River and the Watershed is built out of them: paving a watershed raises flood peaks AND lowers baseflow through one mechanism (lesson 2); a dam trapping sediment starves the channel below and stops resupplying the delta a thousand miles away (lesson 6); fertiliser on an Indiana field ends as an oxygen-depleted zone in the Gulf (lessons 9 and 10). PARTIAL because of the first verb: the learner ANALYZES geoscience data only in the capstone, where they read a USGS gauge record and an EPA impairment listing for their own watershed. The lessons supply the analysis; the student repeats it once.

• HS-ESS2-5

  Partially covered

  Plan and conduct an investigation of the properties of water and its effects on Earth materials and surface processes.

  Covered by

  • The River and the Watershed

  • · 5 · The river shapes the land
  • · 6 · Sediment, and what a dam does to it
  • · 9 · Why the oxygen runs out

  What we do and don't cover: PARTIAL, and the gap is the entire first half of the sentence. The CONTENT is taught directly and at length: water's properties drive erosion and deposition, meanders, cut banks and point bars (lesson 5), sediment transport and what a dam does to it (lesson 6), and density stratification, which is why the Gulf hypoxic zone persists through the summer (lesson 9). But the learner never PLANS AND CONDUCTS AN INVESTIGATION. There is no laboratory work in this catalog and no fieldwork is required to finish this course. If your science requirement is assessed on students conducting investigations, this contributes and does not discharge. Course 4 of this track teaches how to design one; running it is still the student's own project.

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 curriculum does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — almost nothing. There is no laboratory work, no investigation and no scientific modelling here. We claim a single NGSS performance expectation, partially, and we explain exactly why on the entry itself. It is not a science course and we will not sell it as one.
• Prohibition and mass incarceration. The curriculum teaches both. D.C.'s 2023 social studies standards contain no standard on either (we searched the full document), so there is nothing for us to cite. The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• D.C.'s economics and geography strands. In the 2023 document these are un-numbered “statements of practice”, not coded standards. There is no code to cite, so we cite none — even though the economics content lines up well.
• The wider catalog — not yet mapped for D.C. The civics, U.S. history, health, and PE mapping done for Indiana has not been repeated against D.C.'s frameworks yet. D.C. currently carries the Commodity Map alignment only; the catalog-wide pass is queued.