Iowa standards alignment

• SS.9-12.Gov.13

  Covered

  Analyze the electoral process and election systems in the United States, specifically Iowa election law including registration requirements, paper ballots, and absentee voting.

  Covered by

  • Iowa Civics: How Your State Government Works
  • Voting & Elections 101

  • · Iowa Civics, Lesson 1 · The Iowa caucuses: going first in presidential politics
  • · Iowa Civics, Lesson 2 · Iowa's nonpartisan redistricting: a national model
  • · Iowa Civics, Lesson 4 · How a bill becomes law, local government, and getting involved
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 4 · The Electoral College: how it works
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 5 · Why the Electoral College exists
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lessons 1-3 · registration, primaries and caucuses, how you vote
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 7 · Counting, canvassing, and certifying the vote
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 8 · Verify your own registration and rules
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 1 · Registering to vote

  Note: The flagship's most distinctive material lands here: the Iowa Caucuses (named in the standard's clarification), Iowa's registration, absentee/early-voting, and county-auditor administration, and — under the standard's redistricting clarification — Iowa's nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency maps, a national anti-gerrymandering model. The Electoral College and the general registration/primary/count mechanics are taught in the general voting courses.

• SS.9-12.Gov.7

  Partially covered

  Analyze the function, duties, and authority of the executive branch, including the scope of presidential powers, executive orders, executive agreements, and the president's role in foreign and domestic policy.

  Covered by

  • US Civics 101: How American Government Works
  • US Constitution 101: The Document That Builds the Government
  • Voting & Elections 101

  • · US Civics 101, Lesson 1 · Purpose of government and the three branches
  • · US Constitution 101, Lessons 3-6 · Articles I-III and checks & balances
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 4 · The Electoral College: how it works
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 5 · Why the Electoral College exists

  What we do and don't cover: Article II's executive role and the Electoral College are taught; the standard's executive orders, executive agreements, the federal bureaucracy's structure, and the president's foreign-policy role are not a dedicated unit, so this is partial.

• SS.9-12.Gov.17

  Partially covered

  Analyze the rights, liberties, duties, and responsibilities of citizens of the United States and the state of Iowa.

  Covered by

  • Citizenship & Naturalization Basics
  • Jury Duty & the Courts (the citizen's side)
  • Voting & Elections 101
  • The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights
  • Iowa Civics: How Your State Government Works

  • · Citizenship & Naturalization Basics, Lesson 7 · Rights and responsibilities of citizenship
  • · Jury Duty & the Courts · the whole course (the citizen's side of the court system)
  • · Voting & Elections 101, Lesson 1 · Registering to vote
  • · 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
  • · Iowa Civics, Lesson 4 · How a bill becomes law, local government, and getting involved

  What we do and don't cover: The rights and liberties in the Bill of Rights, the duty of jury service, the right to vote (including Iowa's own rules), and contacting a government official are each taught; the standard's Selective Service registration duty is not, so this is partial.

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 adopted as the Iowa Core: nothing claimed. Iowa adopted the Common Core State Standards for mathematics as the Iowa Core, but this catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Iowa mathematics standard. One nuance: Iowa's own Civics/Government standard SS.9-12.Gov.13 cross-references two statistics codes — A1.S-ID.C.9 (“Distinguish between correlation and causation”) and ST.S-IC.B.6 (“Evaluate reports based on data”) — that lightly touch the catalog's misleading-statistics media literacy. But the catalog does no mathematics instruction and does not run the statistical analysis those codes require, so we do not claim them.
• Science — NGSS-BASED (Iowa was a 2015 Lead State) but with documented Iowa revisions: deferred. Iowa's State Board of Education adopted the Next Generation Science Standards in August 2015, having helped write them as a Lead State Partner. But Iowa's science standards have documented later revisions (notably to climate-related expectations), so — unlike Michigan, which adopted the NGSS verbatim and reuses the shared NGSS mapping — we could not confirm within this pass that Iowa's HS-ESS3-1 (the one climate/resource expectation this catalog could touch) is a byte-for-byte NGSS republication. Our rule is verbatim-or-nothing, so we do NOT alias the shared NGSS framework here and DEFER Iowa's science standards rather than cite text we have not cleanly verified. The catalog's climate/resource content (resources, hazards, and climate shaping human activity) would map to Iowa's Earth and Space Science standards; that is deferred, not denied.
• English/Language Arts — Common-Core-derived but Iowa revised, so NOT aliased. Iowa adopted the Common Core for ELA as the Iowa Core, but the current (2024) Iowa Academic Standards for English Language Arts revised some codes. Of the six literacy codes this catalog touches, RH.11-12.6/8/9 are verbatim identical to the shared Common Core file, but RI.11-12.6 (“…or artistry of the text” vs Common Core's “…or beauty of the text”) and WHST.11-12.8 (“multiple credible primary and secondary… including recognition of bias” vs Common Core's “multiple authoritative… sources”) are Iowa's own revised wording. Because two of the six diverge, we do not alias the shared Common Core ELA framework — that would misrepresent Iowa's revised codes as verbatim Common Core. We instead transcribe Iowa's own verbatim literacy standards in the ia-literacy framework above.
• Iowa's caucuses, nonpartisan redistricting, and Missouri-Plan judiciary have no discrete benchmark. The flagship teaches the Iowa Caucuses, Iowa's nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency redistricting, and its merit-selection-plus-retention judiciary as headline features. The Iowa Caucuses are named only in the clarification of SS.9-12.Gov.13, and redistricting/gerrymandering appear only in that standard's “May include” list; the Missouri-Plan judiciary sits inside SS.9-12.Gov.18 (the state government) rather than as a benchmark of its own. So they are claimed through Gov.13 and Gov.18 rather than as standards in their own right.
• The sovereign Meskwaki Nation tribal government (SS.9-12.Gov.19). Iowa's Civics/Government course carries a dedicated benchmark on the sovereign Meskwaki Nation's tribal government — the Meskwaki Tribal Constitution, Council, and Court, and the Settlement's status as privately purchased land rather than a federal reservation. Iowa Civics teaches Iowa's state and local structure but not tribal government, so SS.9-12.Gov.19 is not claimed. The gap is in the course, not the standards.
• The political-science and civic-virtue benchmarks we checked and rejected. SS.9-12.Gov.1 (origins of government and alternative systems, including crimes against humanity by communist regimes), SS.9-12.Gov.2 (Enlightenment philosophers and the Federalist/Anti-Federalist Papers as named content), SS.9-12.Gov.5 (government's role in maintaining order through safety/morality/health laws), SS.9-12.Gov.11 (patterns of political action and activism), SS.9-12.Gov.12 (intermediary institutions — interest groups, parties, media, campaigns, political socialization), SS.9-12.Gov.15 (biographies of exemplary Iowans and Americans who promoted civic virtue), SS.9-12.Gov.16 (civic virtue as a named concept), and the inquiry-mechanics anchors SS.9-12.1, SS.9-12.2, and SS.9-12.6 (developing compelling/supporting questions and constructing sequenced responses) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, or teach them too thinly to claim, so we do not claim them.