Mississippi standards alignment

• USG.3

  Covered

  Differentiate the basic organization of the US government and explain the function of each branch of the US government.

  Covered by

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

  • · US Civics 101, Lesson 1 · Purpose of government and the three branches
  • · 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
  • · The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch, Lesson 1 · The federal judiciary: from district courts to the Supreme Court
  • · The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch, Lesson 7 · Checks on the Court
  • · US Civics 101, Lesson 4 · The courts and judicial review (Marbury v. Madison)
  • · US Constitution 101, Lesson 6 · Separation of powers and checks & balances
  • · US Constitution 101, Lesson 7 · Federalism: state and federal power

  Note: The three branches and their functions, checks and balances, the federal courts' organization and jurisdiction, and judicial review (USG.3 objective 10 names Marbury v. Madison) are taught end to end across the general civics courses.

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 — Common-Core-derived MS CCRS: nothing claimed. Mississippi adopted the Common Core for mathematics as the MS College- and Career-Readiness Standards, but this catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Mississippi mathematics standard.
• Science — Mississippi's own 2018 standards (NOT NGSS): nothing claimed. Mississippi did NOT adopt the Next Generation Science Standards; its science standards are Mississippi's own (the 2018 Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Standards for Science). So the shared NGSS framework (which NGSS states adopt) does not apply here and is not aliased. This catalog has no laboratory work, investigation, or scientific modeling, and its climate/resource content would at most map to Mississippi's own Earth/Environmental science standards — deferred this pass, not claimed unverified.
• English/Language Arts RI.11-12.6 — in Mississippi's separate ELA document: deferred. The catalog's rhetoric/persuasion strength (analyzing how style and content make a text persuasive) maps to RI.11-12.6 (Reading Informational Text). That code lives in Mississippi's separate ELA-teacher standards document rather than the 2025 MS CCRS for Literacy and Writing we transcribed here, so we did not verify its verbatim Mississippi wording this pass. Verbatim-or-nothing: it is deferred, not aliased.
• Mississippi's Lieutenant Governor, struck-down initiative, and 2020 changes have no discrete benchmark. The flagship teaches Mississippi's unusually powerful Lieutenant Governor, its ballot-initiative process struck down in 2021 (the five-congressional-district signature formula that became impossible after Mississippi dropped to four U.S. House seats), the 2020 removal of the Jim Crow-era statewide-election rule, and the 2020 adoption of a new state flag as headline features. Mississippi's MS.10 standard names none of them individually (it says only "the structure and function of local and state government in Mississippi"), so they are claimed through MS.10 rather than as standards of their own.
• The abstract-concept and linkage-institution benchmarks we checked and rejected. USG.1 (the basic concepts of democracy — the worth and dignity of the individual, equality under law, majority rule vs. minority rights, compromise) is too abstract to claim as a dedicated unit, and the party / PAC / campaign-finance / interest-group core of USG.6 is not taught (USG.6 is claimed only partially, through its two media-evaluation objectives). The courses do not genuinely teach these, so we do not claim them.
• Mississippi's US History, World History, Economics, Geography, and Mississippi Studies history strands — deferred, not denied. The catalog's commodity, colonial, labor, civil-rights, and Cold-War history and its commodity economics WOULD map to Mississippi's US History, World History, Economics, and Geography courses and to the history strands of the Mississippi Studies course (MS.1-9, MS.11, MS.12), as they do in other states. Those strands were not transcribed this pass; they are deferred (verbatim-or-nothing), not claimed unverified. This pass mapped the US Government course, the Mississippi Studies government standard (MS.10), and the grades 11-12 literacy standards.