repository author/maintainer: Matt Wilkins
a project of
, an education studio dedicated to translating current research into highly interdisciplinary lessons that are free for teachers.
What is this?
- A single .xlsx file containing the major learning standards for the four main subjects in US K-12 public schools:
- I’ve also included the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These are incredibly ambitious goals set by the international community to (among other things) eliminate poverty, hunger, gender inequality, fight climate change, and preserve 10% of terrestrial and marine habitat by 2030. These goals are aspirational, of course, but students need to see that there’s hope and solutions to all the depressing problems we hear about on a daily basis. Here’s a succinct, and inspiring explanation of why we should #teachSDGs by human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai:
Malala introducing the The Worlds Largest Lesson from World's Largest Lesson on Vimeo.
- R scripts used to aggregate these data. Note the repo I got the SDGs from is no longer online.
Motivations
As a published researcher, I readily recognize that science without math makes no sense; science not communicated well does not move us forward; and science and society are influenced by each other in myriad ways. It’s absolutely nuts that any of these subjects should be taught in isolation—it hurts long-term retention because students don’t see the value of isolated knowledge, and it doesn’t prepare students for how problems will be encountered outside of school and in the workplace. Yet, in 2021 lessons are still about as siloed as they were when I was a kid. Why is that?
Turns out a central problem was that nobody seems to have even compiled these standards into 1 easily explorable data file. The standards are all explorable in their separate databases and it’s kind of a hassle to go back and forth between them. Worse, if you’re like me and want everything to be in a spreadsheet, where codes and statements are searchable, filterable, and sortable, you’re outta luck. Common Core is available in a really complicated XML format. C3 was previously only in PDF form, and NGSS wasn’t publicly downloadable anywhere I could find. There actually was an NSF and Gates Foundation-founded project to make all the standards (like all of em) around the world, in the US, etc. searchable. It’s called the Achievement Standards Network—you’ve probably never heard of it; the downloadable formats are useless for the average person, the main search function is paywalled and seems pretty targeted at enterprise edtech companies. Partially funded by the American public…don’t get me started 
Anyway, long story short: the first step to making it easier for anyone to make interdisciplinary lessons that are actually useful to teachers is to have all the standards be searchable in 1 spreadsheet. So I made one!
Please let me know if this file is useful to you!
- tag me on Twitter: @mattwilkinsbio
- and follow GP: @galacticPM
Copyright and Licenses
Neither I (Matt Wilkins) nor Galactic Polymath claim any copyright to any of the standards aggregated here. I have merely compiled these multi-subject standards for the purpose of stimulating the development of interdisciplinary lessons and curricula.
- the Common Core State Standards are © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.
- NGSS standards are offered through a public license: NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press., though see acknowledgements for reference to specific codes developed by Ted Willard.
- the C3 standards are published by the National Council for the Social Studies, Silver Spring, MD under a public domain license.
Acknowledgements
- NGSS standards data were provided by Ted Willard. Codes for cross-cutting-concepts follow the system he developed for his book The NSTA Atlas of the Three Dimensions.
- C3 standards were provided by John Lee, PhD through helpful communications with Dr. Kathy Swan
