California standards alignment

• 12.4.1

  Partially covered

  Discuss Article I of the Constitution as it relates to the legislative branch, including eligibility for office and lengths of terms of representatives and senators; election to office; the roles of the House and Senate in impeachment proceedings; the role of the vice president; the enumerated legislative powers; and the process by which a bill becomes a law.

  Covered by

  • US Constitution 101: The Document That Builds the Government
  • How a Bill Becomes Law (Federal): From Idea to Public Law
  • US Civics 101: How American Government Works

  • · US Constitution 101, Lessons 3-6 · Articles I-III and checks & balances
  • · How a Bill Becomes Law (Federal) · the whole course, introduction to public law
  • · US Civics 101, Lesson 3 · How a bill becomes a law

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: Article I's structure, the enumerated powers, and the bill-to-law process are taught in depth (the process gets an entire course, committees through veto override). The impeachment roles and the vice president's legislative role are touched only in passing.

• 12.5.3

  Partially covered

  Evaluate the effects of the Court’s interpretations of the Constitution in Marbury v. Madison, McCulloch v. Maryland, and United States v. Nixon, with emphasis on the arguments espoused by each side in these cases.

  Covered by

  • US Civics 101: How American Government Works
  • State vs Federal Power: How American Government Is Divided

  • · US Civics 101, Lesson 4 · The courts and judicial review (Marbury v. Madison)
  • · State vs Federal Power, Lesson 2 · Three kinds of power: enumerated, implied, reserved
  • · State vs Federal Power, Lesson 3 · The enumerated powers: Article I, § 8 (the Necessary and Proper Clause)
  • · State vs Federal Power, Lesson 6 · Concurrent powers: what both levels share
  • · State vs Federal Power, Lesson 7 · McCulloch v. Maryland (1819): implied powers and supremacy

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: two of the three named cases are taught as rules a student can apply — Marbury (judicial review) and McCulloch (implied powers and supremacy). United States v. Nixon is not taught.

• 12.7.6

  Partially covered

  Compare the processes of lawmaking at each of the three levels of government, including the role of lobbying and the media.

  Covered by

  • How a Bill Becomes Law (Federal): From Idea to Public Law
  • US Civics 101: How American Government Works
  • California Civics: How Your State Government Works
  • US, State & Local Government: Who Does What

  • · How a Bill Becomes Law (Federal) · the whole course, introduction to public law
  • · US Civics 101, Lesson 3 · How a bill becomes a law
  • · California Civics, Lesson 4 · How a bill becomes a California law
  • · US, State & Local Government, Lesson 5 · What LOCAL government handles (and why it VARIES)
  • · US, State & Local Government, Lesson 7 · The governments you forget: special districts & boards

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: two of the three levels are taught in genuine procedural depth — the federal process and California's own (committee filter, two-thirds override, line-item veto) — and the local level's structure is taught. Local lawmaking procedure and the lobbying/media roles are not worked systematically.

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 — the interpret-it standards only, and never the produce-it ones. One course, How to Read a Number, teaches the reading of published quantities: provenance, denominators, what a summary discarded, what a margin of error covers, correlation against causation, and the arithmetic of representation. It grades no arithmetic. Every assessment is scenario multiple-choice or a click-to-reveal self-check, and the learner is never asked to produce a number. So we claim the standards about interpreting and evaluating data, and we do NOT claim S-ID.1, S-ID.4, S-ID.6, S-ID.8, S-IC.2, S-IC.4 or S-IC.5, every one of which requires the student to construct a plot, fit a model, compute a correlation coefficient, run a simulation, or develop a margin of error. A course that never asks for those cannot claim them. If your mathematics requirement is assessed on students producing statistical work, this contributes to it and does not discharge it. We also claim nothing in algebra, functions, geometry or probability, because we teach none of it.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. California adopted the NGSS verbatim (September 4, 2013), so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. We verified California's edits document: it touches seven clarification statements, none of them HS-ESS3-1. There is no laboratory work, no investigation, and no modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• The California Civics flagship's structure lessons have mostly no California code to cite. California Civics: How Your State Government Works teaches the 1879 constitution, the plural executive (a Lieutenant Governor elected separately from the Governor), the 120-seat Legislature, the top-two primary, and AB 37's universal mail ballots — from California's own official sources. But the 1998 Principles of American Democracy standards are overwhelmingly FEDERAL: state government enters only through the comparative 12.7 standards (lawmaking, courts, local responsibilities — which the course backs) and direct democracy through 12.6.5. The plural executive, the Legislature's shape, and California's election on-ramps have no code to cite. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The Great Migration — California's 1998 standards never name it. An entire course teaches the Great Migration, but the 1998 document contains no standard on it: 11.2's rural-to-urban migration is the European-immigration industrial city, and 11.10.5's civil-rights diffusion names the churches, not the Migration. The Migration's content maps only where the standards name its people and politics (11.10.1, 11.10.4). The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• 10.2's named revolutions exclude Haiti. Our deep revolution is the Haitian Revolution — taught through to the 1825 indemnity. California's 10.2 compares the Glorious, American, and French Revolutions, and its philosopher list reaches Latin America only through Bolívar; Haiti is not named anywhere in the document. We do not stretch adjacency into coverage, so 10.2 is not claimed.
• Most of the Grade 12 civics standards we checked. 12.1.1-12.1.4 (the political-philosophy genealogy and the Federalist Papers as texts), 12.2.2 (economic rights), 12.2.5 (reciprocity of rights and obligations as a named concept), 12.3.1-12.3.4 (civil society), 12.4.3 (identify your current representatives — a live exercise our courses prompt but do not assess), 12.5.2 (judicial activism versus restraint), 12.5.4 (the civil-rights controversy case list), 12.6.1/12.6.3 (party history, polls and campaign funding), 12.7.1/12.7.5/12.7.8 (intergovernmental conflict resolution, public-policy formation, presidential case studies), 12.8.1-12.8.3 (media influence on political life — our media-literacy course is consumer protection, not political media analysis), and 12.9.1-12.9.6/12.9.8 (comparative systems beyond the Poland standard) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, so we do not claim them.
• Economics standards we checked and rejected — and no economic-systems home. All of Econ 12.1 (scarcity, opportunity cost, incentives as named concepts), 12.2.1/12.2.3-12.2.10 (market mechanics as a unit), 12.3 (fiscal and monetary policy), 12.4.2/12.4.3 (the current labor market and wage theory), and 12.5 (macroeconomic measurement) are not genuinely taught. The reciprocity-versus-market-economies content — taught directly and at length — has no home either: California's 1998 economics section contains no comparative-economic-systems standard (12.9.1 in the civics section touches economic philosophies, but as regime ideology, which our courses reach only for Poland). The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• Health content areas beyond Personal and Community Health. Nutrition and Physical Activity, Growth/Development and Sexual Health, Injury Prevention and Safety, Alcohol/Tobacco/Other Drugs, and Mental/Emotional/Social Health were checked against the grades 9-12 standards and are not genuinely taught by these courses. The BVC drug-history curriculum teaches the HISTORY and policy of substances, not the health-behavior content the ATOD standards ask for (e.g., 1.1.A's health benefits of abstaining), so it claims nothing there.
• PE performance and participation standards — and no technology standard to cite. Every Course 1 and Course 2 standard that asks a student to DEMONSTRATE movement, PARTICIPATE in activity, or achieve measured fitness levels (all of Standard 1's performance halves, 2.1-2.3, 2.5, and the Standard 3 self-responsibility-in-activity outcomes) is out of reach of an online course; we claim knowledge- and planning-side standards only. And unlike Arizona (S3.H2.L2) and Arkansas (PFL.3.3), California's 2005 document predates wearables and has no technology-for-activity standard — so our tracker course's strongest PE claim has no California code. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. California's closest frameworks (Computer Science, World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no California claims this pass.