Utah standards alignment

• U.S. GOV Standard 2.1

  Covered

  Students will use historic and modern case studies, including Supreme Court cases, amendment initiatives, and legislation to trace the application of civil liberties, civil rights, and responsibilities spelled out in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other amendments.

  Covered by

  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights
  • The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch

  • · Know Your Rights, Lessons 2-5 · speech, religion, press, assembly, including at school and online
  • · Know Your Rights, Lessons 6-8 · the 4th Amendment: searches, stops, and your digital life
  • · The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch, Lesson 5 · Writing the opinion: majority, concurrence, dissent, and precedent
  • · The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights, Lesson 1 · What is the Bill of Rights?

  Note: The standard's core method — tracing the application of civil liberties and rights through historic and modern Supreme Court cases — is exactly the rights curriculum: Tinker, Brandenburg, Mapp, Terry, T.L.O., Riley, and Carpenter as applicable rules, how precedent expands rights over time, and the Bill of Rights as the document those rights are spelled out in.

• U.S. GOV Standard 2.2

  Partially covered

  Students will examine various perspectives on a current rights-related issue; take a position; defend that position using the Constitution and Bill of Rights, historical precedents, Supreme Court decisions, and other relevant resources; and share that position, when possible, with relevant stakeholders.

  Covered by

  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights

  • · Know Your Rights, Lesson 2 · Freedom of speech: what's protected, and what isn't
  • · Know Your Rights, Lesson 5 · Speech and religion at school, and online
  • · Know Your Rights, Lesson 7 · Police stops, reasonable suspicion, and your privacy
  • · Know Your Rights, Lessons 2-5 · speech, religion, press, assembly, including at school and online
  • · Know Your Rights, Lessons 6-8 · the 4th Amendment: searches, stops, and your digital life

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: the rights knowledge to take and defend a position is taught in depth — when government may and may not constitutionally limit rights, and the landmark cases and precedents to reason from. The examine-perspectives, take-a-position, and share-with-stakeholders performance happens in a classroom we do not run.

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. Utah adopted the Common Core State Standards for mathematics, but this catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Utah Core mathematics standard.
• The main ELA reading-informational strand — Utah's 2023 revision diverged from the shared file. Utah adopted the Common Core for ELA, and its disciplinary-literacy strands (RH.11-12.6/8/9 and WHST.11-12.7/8) are verbatim CCSS and mapped above. But Utah's 2023 ELA revision replaced the old reading-informational standard RI.11-12.6 (an author's point of view where the rhetoric is particularly effective) with a reworded standard, Utah's 11-12.R.11, whose text is different. Our rhetoric-of-persuasion work (bvc.rhetoric-power-persuasion) therefore has no verbatim Utah home and is not claimed here; it maps to the disciplinary-literacy standards we do cite, not the general reading-informational strand.
• Science — Utah's SEEd Standards are Utah's own, not verbatim NGSS (deferred). Utah teaches its own SEEd (Science with Engineering Education) Standards — NGSS-influenced but reorganized, and NOT verbatim NGSS — so our shared NGSS file does not apply and we will not alias it. The one Earth-science-adjacent claim other states hang on HS-ESS3-1 (climate and resource availability shaping human activity) is deferred until the SEEd document is fetched and its wording verified against Utah's own codes. There is no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling in this catalog either way.
• U.S. GOV Standard 3.5, 3.6 — the cabinet and administrative rulemaking. Standard 3.5 (how the individual roles of the President's cabinet meet various purposes) and Standard 3.6 (how the administrative rule-making process functions within the federal system) are not genuinely taught by these courses.
• Strand 4 — FISCAL POLICIES AND DECISIONS. Standards 4.1–4.3 (the fiscal decisions governmental agencies make and their guiding economic philosophies, the revenue streams and taxes that fund government, and proposing and defending a budget) are not taught. This catalog does no public-finance or personal-finance instruction.
• U.S. GOV Standard 5.1 and 5.4 — foreign-policy structure and the global-issue argument. Standard 5.1 (the constitutional process of creating foreign policy and the structures — the Department of State, treaties, agreements, alliances — through which the federal government interacts with foreign governments) is not taught. Standard 5.4 (craft an argument for an appropriate role for the United States in a global economic, environmental, or social issue such as humanitarian aid, migration, pandemics, or wildlife habitat) is not claimed: the Coffee project's argument paper is on a global commodity issue, not framed as the United States' role, so we will not stretch it into this standard.
• U.S. GOV Standard 3.3's interest-group half, and the party/lobbying content. We claim Standard 3.3 for how Utahns organize through the dual-path caucus-and-signature system, but not for its interest-group half: political parties as institutions, special-interest groups, lobbying, and evaluating the political impact of those affiliations are not taught (our media-literacy work is consumer protection, not political-media analysis).
• Tribal governments (U.S. GOV Standard 3.1). Standard 3.1 names the distribution of power among national, state, tribal, and local governments, and the course preface notes American Indian tribal governments' unique relationship. Utah Civics teaches Utah's state and local structure but not tribal governments, so Standard 3.1 is claimed as partial and the tribal dimension is not claimed. The gap is in the course, not the standards.
• Utah's own state structure is taught more fully than any one code captures. Utah Civics teaches the dual-path (caucus-convention or signature) nomination system, the 1896 statehood story (polygamy banned, women's suffrage from the start), the joint-ticket Governor and Lieutenant Governor (the latter as chief elections officer), the 45-day part-time Legislature, merit selection with a Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, and all-mail elections — from Utah's own sources. Utah's government course has no dedicated state-structure standard, so Standards 3.1, 3.3, and 3.4 are the generous homes we cite this content under; the 45-day session, the plural executive, and the performance-evaluation-aided retention have no code of their own.