Wyoming standards alignment

• SS12.3.4

  Partially covered

  Explain how financial and government institutions make economic decisions (e.g., banking, investment, credit, regulation, and debt).

  Covered by

  • Banking, and Who Has No Bank

  • · 1 · What a deposit account actually is
  • · 3 · The fee schedule is a document you can demand
  • · 13 · Overdraft is a mechanism, and it has an on switch
  • · 15 · Why the cost lands where it does, and what an alternative looks like
  • · 2 · The first gate: four pieces of information
  • · 9 · The second gate: a report about you that you have never seen
  • · 10 · The letter that has to tell you who was consulted
  • · 11 · Getting the file, and what a dispute actually does
  • · 14 · The rule that was made, and then unmade
  • · 23 · Read your own account: what this course leaves you able to do
  • · 5 · The survey that counts them, and what it counts
  • · 6 · The reasons, in their own words
  • · 7 · The distribution is not random
  • · 17 · Money orders and check cashing, priced
  • · 18 · Prepaid cards and payment apps, and the disclosure on the packet
  • · 19 · Why a reasonable person chooses the substitute
  • · 21 · The bank desert, and who a branch closure is for

  What we do and don't cover: Partial, and it is the banking-and-regulation half of Wyoming's own illustrative list. HOW A FINANCIAL INSTITUTION DECIDES is taught as a mechanism rather than as a description: the identity rule it must satisfy before opening an account (31 CFR 1020.220), the deposit-screening report it consults and the federal statute that governs that report, and the fee structure it sets and must disclose. HOW A GOVERNMENT INSTITUTION DECIDES is taught from three worked cases: the FDIC and the NCUA on insurance, the CFPB writing the overdraft opt-in and prepaid disclosure rules, and Congress nullifying an agency rule under the Congressional Review Act, which is a decision about banking made by a body that is not a bank. Investment, credit and debt, the other three examples Wyoming names, are not taught here.

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 Wyoming Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Wyoming's 2016 Science standards are built on the NGSS, 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.
• The Wind River / tribal-sovereignty sub-benchmarks (every .a code). Wyoming's social-studies standards are saturated with Indian Education for All: SS12.1.1.a (comparing tribal-member and citizen rights on the Wind River Indian Reservation), SS12.1.3.a (governance of the Indigenous Tribes of Wyoming through Congressional Acts and Supreme Court decisions — the Marshall Trilogy, U.S. v. Shoshone Tribe of Indians), SS12.1.5.a (the inherent powers of Wyoming's tribes), SS12.2.1.a-2.4.a, SS12.4.1.a/4.4.a/4.5.a, and SS12.5.2.a/5.3.a. These are specific, sovereign, Wyoming-tribal content — the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, treaties, boarding schools, land cessions — that this catalog does not teach. We claim none of them.
• Standard 2 — Culture and Cultural Diversity — nothing. SS12.2.1-2.2.4 ask students to analyze how groups meet human needs and express culture, and to evaluate cultural assimilation and preservation in Wyoming, the United States, and the world — the standard is anchored in Wyoming's own and Indigenous cultural life. The catalog does not teach this, so we claim no Standard 2 benchmark.
• SS12.1.4 — the U.S. civil and criminal legal systems. SS12.1.4 asks students to demonstrate an understanding of, and distinguish between, the United States civil and criminal legal systems at the federal, state, and tribal levels. The Civics courses teach jury service and the judiciary's structure, but not the civil-vs-criminal-systems distinction the standard names, so we do not claim it.
• The economics and history benchmarks we checked and rejected. SS12.3.5 (how values and beliefs influence micro/macroeconomic decisions) and SS12.4.3 (given a current event, critique the actors and hypothesize how it would have played out in another country — not this catalog's method) are not genuinely taught, so we do not claim them. SS12.3.4 used to sit in this list too; see the entry below.
• SS12.3.4 — this rejection has been superseded, as a partial. Until 2026-08-28 this list rejected SS12.3.4 with the reason that the catalog teaches no financial literacy. It now teaches one course of it, MONEY-01, on how a consumer credit decision is made, and SS12.3.4 is claimed above as a partial. The benchmark's own clause about how financial and government institutions make economic decisions is met in full; four of its five parenthetical examples are taught (banking, credit, regulation, debt) and the fifth, investment, is not taught at all and will not be until MONEY-07 ships. We record that as partial rather than full because a teacher planning against this benchmark needs to know which fifth of it they still have to cover, and because treating an "e.g." list as decorative is how a claim gets quietly widened. SS12.3.5 remains rejected on its own terms: the ECOA prohibited-bases material and the redlining history in the catalog do show beliefs shaping who received credit, but the course does not deliver that as a micro-and-macroeconomic decision framework, and macroeconomics is an explicit exclusion.
• SS12.5.3 and SS12.6.3 — sense of place, and digital production. SS12.5.3 asks how conflict, demographics, movement, trade, and technology affect humans' “sense of place” — the catalog teaches trade and movement, but not sense of place as the geographic object of study, so we do not claim it. SS12.6.3 (use digital tools to research, design, and present social studies concepts, per the ISTE student standards) is a production standard the catalog does not deliver.
• Wyoming's own state structure is taught more fully than any one code captures. Wyoming Civics teaches the 1889 constitution's equal-political-rights founding, the five-officer plural executive with no lieutenant governor (the Secretary of State succeeds the Governor), the part-time citizen Legislature and its short biennial sessions, the absence of a state income tax, the Missouri-Plan judiciary, direct democracy with high thresholds, and the 23 counties — from Wyoming's own sources. SS12.1.5 (structures of both constitutions) hosts most of it, but the succession quirk, the no-income-tax fact, and the initiative's high thresholds have no code of their own.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Wyoming's other frameworks (Computer Science, World Languages) have not been fetched and verified against these courses yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Wyoming claims this pass.