Ohio curriculum content audit — 7 September 2026

Verdict: partially aligned in its structure and content targets, but not a complete instructional curriculum for Ohio schools. The repository has a substantial Ohio standards index. That index must not be mistaken for lessons, demonstrated coverage, district adoption, or an approved core instructional program. This review covers the local repository and its production build, not a separately inspected live deployment.

The full K–12 content expansion remains unfinished. The new material below is a substantial first instructional batch, not a claim that every missing standard has been filled.

Publication update

The user reviewed the illustrated preview and confirmed “already reviewed, finish all pending”. That approval applies to the eight new illustrated lessons and four tests containing 48 questions. These records are now marked published; the other 195 questions remain drafts. Approval evidence is recorded in the authoring folder. No personal reviewer name, educator credential, district adoption, or complete K–12 approval is inferred.

The production lesson hub is /learn/, with eight interactive illustrated pages, full explanations, worked examples, independent tasks and scoring rubrics. Published tests also run in the scored practice interface. The initial inventory and findings below describe the authoring baseline unless explicitly updated.

What was examined

• All 1,830 top-level standard/content-statement records across the four subject datasets, retaining separate framework versions and all zero-content slices.

• All 195 pre-existing questions, eight pre-existing practice sets, publication fields, source bindings, and existing QA/calibration rules.

• The content build and application routes: practice delivery existed; this release adds the illustrated lesson delivery route and publication-gated lesson build.

• Current Ohio Department of Education and Workforce standards webpages and the newly identified July 2026 K–8 social studies document.

• The eight new lessons and 48 original questions, including their answer keys, explanations, distractor feedback, performance tasks, and explicit scope limitations.

This is a full inventory and automated corpus audit with targeted substantive review. It is not a fresh expert educational review of every existing question. Automated checks can establish valid identifiers and answer shapes; they cannot establish that a question genuinely assesses every verb and clause of a standard.

Inventory before and after authoring

The new questions deepen eight existing targets and accompany previously missing instruction. They do not increase the number of distinct standards with a question. In the current index, 1,657 standards have no mapped question and 1,822 have no lesson. Those totals include both ELA framework versions, so they should not be described as the number of standards a single school year requires.

Counts are based on canonical top-level nodes, with direct child question mappings rolled up to their parent. They are not counts of all codes/subparts harvested from PDFs. A mapped question can cover one narrow skill; it does not establish complete instruction, practice variety, or mastery. The complete grade/course table includes every indexed slice. The JSON inventory identifies every missing target, source document/page, and linked question/lesson ID.

Alignment findings and their implications

1. The framework structure is substantially Ohio-specific

The data correctly distinguishes Ohio mathematics codes, ELA grade bands, science course content statements, and ordinal-numbered social studies statements. High-school mathematics uses conceptual-category standards and course overlays. Those distinctions are worth preserving. A generic national curriculum label would not validate these mappings.

Ohio continues to list the adopted 2017 mathematics framework. Its current webpage also lists high-school resources for Data Science Foundations, Advanced Quantitative Reasoning, Statistics and Probability, and Discrete Mathematics/Computer Science. The existing course inventory needs a separate reconciliation with those resources; the presence of core Algebra/Geometry pathways is not evidence of exhaustive current course coverage. ODEW mathematics standards.

Science should be checked against both its content statements and model-curriculum guidance. Ohio explicitly cautions that its brief vertical overview is insufficient for planning instructional details. The current department page identifies the 2018–2019 standards/model-curriculum resources. ODEW science standards and model curriculum.

2. The earlier audit missed the 2026 social studies revision

The repository contains the 2018 social studies framework but not the July 2026 K–8 revision. Ohio anticipates district implementation beginning in 2027–28; the department says high-school courses were unchanged by this revision. Preserve 2018 content with its actual version and add the revised framework separately. Do not relabel old questions by changing their year. ODEW social studies standards.

The revised document introduces a Social Studies Skills strand. Grade 4 provides a concrete example of why ordinal matching is unsafe: its revised statement 2 emphasizes multiple perspectives, whereas the indexed 2018 statement 2 concerns creating historical narratives. Branches of government occur at revised statement 15, compared with indexed 2018 statement 19. A real crosswalk must examine the wording and skill demand. July 2026 K–8 social studies standards, PDF pages 2 and 10–11.

3. ELA has a transition requirement as well as a content gap

The project retains both the 2017 and 2026 frameworks. Ohio identifies 2026–27 as a transition year and 2027–28 as the first implementation year for the revised K–8 standards; grades 9–12 remain the 2017 standards. Ohio says state-test alignment changes will follow as applicable, with further information forthcoming. Do not invent the exact assessment transition schedule. There are currently no questions or lessons directly mapped to the 423 indexed 2026 ELA standards. ODEW ELA standards and transition information.

The new grade 3 reading units are explicitly 2017-framework material. Their worked examples use original text. An authored perspective comparison alone is not a complete reading program: writing, speaking/listening, decoding, spelling/handwriting, vocabulary, and sustained reading still require systematic instruction and suitable performance assessments.

4. Source extraction needs repair before large-scale authoring

The existing damage heuristic flags 119 top-level records: 82 ELA, 9 mathematics, 17 science, and 11 social studies. This is a review queue, not a confirmed count of incorrect standards. A clean heuristic result is also not proof of accurate extraction.

Two examples from otherwise selectable science records illustrate an additional limitation: C.PM.3 (Chemical bonding) includes long suggested classroom activities inside its amplification, and AP.LO.3 (Homeostasis) similarly mixes investigations with explanatory scope. These activities may be legitimate model-curriculum material, but they should not silently be treated as the exact adopted statement or as mandatory clauses of one lesson. Verify the source layout and distinguish adopted content, elaboration, and instructional examples before claiming complete coverage. This audit has not rewritten or silently reconstructed damaged standards.

5. Existing QA passes do not certify substantive alignment

The original 95-question calibration bank intentionally retains nine known mapping problems so the gate can be tested. Those fixtures must not be counted as approved learning material. The known IDs are q-bio-003, q-g3-ela-009, q-g3-ela-012, q-g3-ela-013, q-g3-math-008, q-g3-math-015, q-g4-ss-002, q-g4-ss-007, and q-k-ela-003. Their preservation is documented in the repository's calibration tests; this run did not mutate them.

Baseline QA reported 187 PASS / 8 WARN / 0 FAIL. After the new questions it reports 235 PASS / 8 WARN / 0 FAIL. The remaining warnings concern three two-part items without dependency metadata, four repeated generic stems in multipart calibration questions, and one short kindergarten arithmetic stem. These require interpretation: independent subquestions do not become evidence-based pairs merely by hiding Part B until Part A is answered. The American History item even records that its two parts assess different spheres rather than a claim/evidence dependency.

The arithmetic checker verified only six items in the full 243-question corpus. The other 237 were not automatically verified by that arithmetic checker; a passing QA status must not be described as 243 independently proven answers.

6. Instructional depth and course coverage are the largest gaps

There were no lessons before this work. Most grades have only a few questions per subject. Chemistry and Human Anatomy and Physiology have zero questions, even though their course standards are indexed. High-school mathematics has questions on only 2 of 151 canonical standards. Grade 5 science has a question mapped to each of its seven statements, but that apparent 100% mapping coverage says nothing about full amplification coverage, investigations, or depth.

Practice tests need more than a collection of recall questions: prerequisite checks, varied contexts, actual student production where required, independent scoring guidance, and enough items to sample the intended skills. The new tests are explicitly narrow unit assessments. No timing, question total, score threshold, reporting-category weighting, or OST equivalence has been presented as an official Ohio specification.

Content created

The review packet contains all four tests, solutions, wrong-answer feedback, instructions, and links to the lessons.

Each lesson has approximately 700–790 words of instruction and tasks, with prerequisites/materials, worked reasoning, misconceptions, guided work, independent work, solutions, scoring guidance, support, and extension. Historical source exercises are clearly labeled fictional, not fabricated archival evidence. The tests have three correct answers in each of A/B/C/D per 12-item test, in shuffled order.

All 48 new questions pass the structural generation gate; all eight lessons pass the lesson gate. Exact alignment quotations were checked against the selected nodes. Lexical alignment warnings remain advisory, especially where a standard's wording differs from the concrete task. Selected-response questions do not demonstrate drawing a number line or writing a narrative; the companion performance tasks explicitly address that limitation.

The final answer-clue audit reports zero item or batch flags across all 48 questions. Its longest-option strategy scores about 15.6%, compared with 25% for random choice. Revisions removed a repeating answer sequence, conspicuous length differences, numerical option patterns, and systematic overclaiming in distractors. The assembly tool now refuses to stage a batch with an item-level surface clue. Passing this construction check does not replace educational review of alignment, difficulty, accessibility, or classroom effectiveness.

Publication and remaining work

The eight illustrated lessons and four tests are published following the user’s review and explicit completion instruction. The production build enforces review requirements on both questions and illustrated lessons. Other drafts remain excluded. See the publication update above and the recorded approval evidence.

To complete the original K–12 expansion:

1. Repair and verify source records; ingest and crosswalk 2026 social studies without overwriting 2018 identities. Reconcile high-school course resources. 2. Prioritize zero-content courses and unserved grade/subject areas using the full inventory, then develop complete units against verified standard clauses. The eight new units address depth, not those remaining breadth gaps. 3. Add writing, speaking/listening, investigation, modeling, and other performance tasks that the current MC/MS/EBSR question schema cannot measure directly. Keep clear teacher-scored rubrics. 4. Extend the now-available lesson delivery to additional reviewed units, keeping the same publication safeguards. 5. Assemble broader grade/course practice tests after sufficient reviewed content exists. Verify any state-test-specific claims against current official specifications rather than extrapolating from curriculum standards.

Reproduce the evidence

The pre-publication baseline verification completed successfully: npm run verify passed all 52 curriculum checks, 51 question checks, source hashing for all 24 registered PDFs, publication-isolation checks, 117 browser route checks, and 111 generation-contract regression tests. Corpus QA retains the eight documented pre-existing warnings and no failures. npm run build also passed. The browser portion required the local preview server outside the filesystem/network sandbox; no deployment was performed.

The new batch separately passed all eight lesson gates, all 48 question gates, verbatim clause-quotation checks, and the zero-flag answer-clue audit. These results establish technical and construction checks, not independent human educational approval.

Run node tools/audit_curriculum_inventory.mjs for the complete inventory. Run node tools/build_ohio_foundations_batch.mjs to assemble and gate this original authored batch in staging. Run python3 tools/content_qa.py, npm run sources:verify, and the repository's npm run verify for the existing validation suites. npm run build checks the production output; its served-question count is now 48. These checks do not establish comprehensive educational coverage.