Pennsylvania standards alignment

• 5.3.12.F

  Covered

  Analyze landmark United States Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution and its Amendments.

  Covered by

  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights
  • US Civics 101: How American Government Works
  • 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
  • · US Civics 101, Lesson 4 · The courts and judicial review (Marbury v. Madison)
  • · The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch, Lesson 5 · Writing the opinion: majority, concurrence, dissent, and precedent
  • · 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

  Note: Landmark cases are taught as rules a student can apply — Marbury (judicial review), Tinker, Brandenburg, Mapp, and how precedent expands rights — alongside the judiciary's structure.

• 5.1.12.E

  Covered

  Analyze and assess the rights of people as written in the PA Constitution and the US Constitution.

  Covered by

  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights
  • Pennsylvania Civics: How Your State Government Works

  • · The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights, Lesson 1 · What is the Bill of Rights?
  • · 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
  • · Pennsylvania Civics, Lesson 1 · Pennsylvania's constitution: the 1968 rulebook and a two-session amendment path (Article XI; the Declaration of Rights)

  Note: The federal Bill of Rights is taught as applicable rules with its landmark cases, and the flagship teaches Pennsylvania's own Article I Declaration of Rights — which in places protects more than the federal document (the Environmental Rights Amendment) — exactly the PA-and-US comparison the standard asks for.

• 5.1.12.A

  Partially covered

  Analyze the sources, purposes, functions of law, and how the rule of law protects individual rights and promotes the common good.

  Covered by

  • US Constitution 101: The Document That Builds the Government
  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights

  • · US Constitution 101, Lessons 2-9 · the Constitution analyzed article by article
  • · 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

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: the Constitution's purposes (analyzed article by article) and how the rule of law both protects and constitutionally limits rights are taught. The standard's broader jurisprudential sweep (the sources and functions of law generally) is not worked systematically.

• 5.2.12.A

  Partially covered

  Evaluate an individual's civil rights, responsibilities and obligations in various contemporary governments.

  Covered by

  • Citizenship & Naturalization Basics
  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights
  • Jury Duty & the Courts (the citizen's side)

  • · Citizenship & Naturalization Basics, Lesson 7 · Rights and responsibilities of citizenship
  • · 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
  • · Jury Duty & the Courts · the whole course (the citizen's side of the court system)

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: an individual's civil rights, and the obligations that come with them (jury service is an entire course; obeying laws and paying taxes a lesson), are taught for the United States. The comparison across “various contemporary governments” is not.

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 Pennsylvania Core mathematics standard.
• Science — nothing, and here is exactly why. Pennsylvania did NOT adopt the NGSS. Its standards in force are the STEELS standards (Science, Technology & Engineering, Environmental Literacy & Sustainability, effective July 2025), which are Pennsylvania's own — so, unlike California, New York, and D.C., there is no shared NGSS performance expectation to adopt here. This is also not a science course (no lab work, no investigation, no modelling). The catalog's resource-availability and climate-change content is claimed instead under Pennsylvania's Geography standard 7.4.12.A, where it honestly belongs.
• The Pennsylvania Civics flagship's distinctive structure has mostly no code to cite. Pennsylvania Civics: How Your State Government Works teaches the nation's largest full-time state legislature (a 203-member House and 50-member Senate), the elected-then-retained judiciary (partisan election to 10-year terms, then nonpartisan yes/no retention, with the Superior and Commonwealth intermediate courts), how a bill becomes a Pennsylvania law (the three-considerations rule, the two-thirds override, and the Governor's line-item veto on appropriations), and Pennsylvania's 67 counties with their ACTIVE township layer — Pennsylvania does NOT abolish townships — under home-rule and code municipalities. Pennsylvania's 2009 Civics standards reach the Commonwealth's own constitution and rights (5.1.12.D, 5.1.12.E) and general electoral processes (5.3.12.E), which the course backs, but the legislature's size, the elected judiciary, the state lawmaking process, and the township layer have no Pennsylvania-specific code. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• Act 77 mail-in voting and Pennsylvania's other election specifics. The flagship teaches Act 77 no-excuse mail-in voting (struck down then upheld in McLinko v. Department of State, 2022), closed primaries, first-time-voter ID, and the 15-day registration deadline with no same-day registration. Pennsylvania's Civics standards name only “United States electoral processes” (5.3.12.E), with no Pennsylvania-specific election standard, so we claim Pennsylvania's own rules only through that general standard and the flagship. The specifics have no code.
• The Opium Wars and the Haitian Revolution — Pennsylvania's history standards are too abstract to name them. The catalog teaches both in depth. Pennsylvania's 2009 History standards are analytical standards organized by broad categories (“conflict and cooperation,” “continuity and change”) rather than by specific events, so — unlike Washington, D.C., whose standards name them explicitly — there is no Pennsylvania standard that names the Opium Wars or the Haitian Revolution to cite. We claim the world-history content only through the broad 8.4 categories, and mark those partial.
• Personal finance and most of the Economics framework. Scarcity and opportunity cost as named concepts (6.1), market competition and economic indicators (6.2.A-C, E, F), public goods and taxation policy (6.3.A, C), and the multinational-corporation and technology standards (6.4.C, D) were checked against the Grade 12 Economics framework and are not genuinely taught by these courses. We claim only the economic-systems, government-in-trade, labor-regulation, comparative-advantage, and supply-and-demand standards the catalog actually reaches.
• The general-ELA rhetoric standard, and the science/technical literacy strand. Pennsylvania revised Common Core's RI.11-12.6 (rhetoric) in its general Core ELA (CC.1.2.11-12.D reads differently), so we do not claim it — the catalog's honest, verbatim literacy home is the History/Social-Studies strand (8.5/8.6) mapped above. Pennsylvania's Reading and Writing in Science and Technical Subjects (3.5/3.6) strand is likewise not claimed by this history-and-economics catalog.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Pennsylvania's relevant frameworks for these (Business, Computer and Information Technology; World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Pennsylvania claims this pass.