Rhode Island standards alignment

• SSHS.CVC.4.4

  Covered

  Analyze the structure and role of the judicial branch of the national government

  Covered by

  • The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch
  • US Civics 101: How American Government Works

  • · 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)
  • · The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch, Lesson 2 · How a judge gets there: nomination and confirmation

  Note: Article III's judiciary, judicial review through Marbury v. Madison (the standard's own check example), and the nomination-and-confirmation process are each taught by name.

• SSHS.CVC.3.4

  Partially covered

  Argue the impacts of interpreting and using the Constitution of the United States to expand freedom and opportunity

  Covered by

  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights
  • The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch
  • The History of Unions: America and the World
  • The Great Migration: How Six Million People Remade America

  • · 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 History of Unions, Lesson 16 · The colour bar: unions' own history of exclusion
  • · The History of Unions, Lesson 17 · Randolph to Memphis: the labor half of the civil-rights movement
  • · The Great Migration, Lesson 2 · The Jim Crow South: what people were fleeing
  • · The Great Migration, Lesson 12 · The long shadow, and the return

  What we do and don't cover: Using the Constitution to expand freedom is taught as usable rules — the landmark rights cases and how Supreme Court precedent expands rights over time — and the civil-rights arc is reached through the labor half of the movement and the Jim Crow order people fled. Partial because the specific amendments and cases the standard names (the 13th/14th/15th, Brown, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 19th) are not each worked.

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 Rhode Island Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Rhode Island was the first state to adopt the NGSS (spring 2013) and reaffirmed it in 2024, 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 Narragansett and other tribal governments (SSHS.CVC.4.5). Rhode Island's SSHS.CVC.4.5 names tribal governments and the Narragansett explicitly, and requires students to analyze the powers and structures of tribal governments and the relationships between the Narragansett and Rhode Island's state and local governments. Rhode Island Civics teaches Rhode Island's state and local structure in depth but does not teach the Narragansett Tribe's government, so SSHS.CVC.4.5 is claimed as partial. The gap is in the course, not the standard.
• Rhode Island's own state structure is taught more fully than SSHS.CVC.4.5 captures. Rhode Island Civics teaches the 1843 constitution and the 2020 removal of “and Providence Plantations,” the two-tier system with 5 counties but NO county governments and 39 all-purpose cities and towns, the long legislative-supremacy tradition and the 2004 separation-of-powers amendment that reined it in, the plural executive with a separately elected Lieutenant Governor, the 75-member House and 38-member Senate with a veto overridable by only three-fifths (and no line-item veto), and the only state Supreme Court whose justices serve for life — all from Rhode Island's own sources. SSHS.CVC.4.5 hosts most of it, but this bespoke 2023 civics frame is inquiry-and-argument based, not a Rhode-Island-government checklist, so the life-tenure court, the 2004 reform, and the 2020 name change have no code of their own.
• The comparative-government, political-science, and world-affairs standards we checked and rejected. The standards the courses do not genuinely teach are not claimed: SSHS.CVC.1.1 (the history and philosophy of different forms of government), SSHS.CVC.2.1 (18th-century philosophical ideas / the Enlightenment thinkers and the American Revolution), SSHS.CVC.2.2 (Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence), SSHS.CVC.3.3 (how the Constitution handled the system of slavery — the Three-Fifths and Fugitive Slave clauses), all of Inquiry Topic 5's party/interest-group standards except the participation standard (SSHS.CVC.5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.5 — money, media, and polling in politics), SSHS.CVC.7.3 (contemporary policy debates such as mass incarceration, gun ownership, affordable housing, and immigration), and all of Inquiry Topic 8 (SSHS.CVC.8.1-8.3 — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.S. human-rights interventions and genocides, and global citizenship). Rhode Island's own deep history in the North American slave trade would be a natural home for SSHS.CVC.3.3, but the course does not teach it, so we do not claim it.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Rhode Island's closest frameworks for these (its digital-literacy/computer-science and world-languages standards) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Rhode Island claims this pass.