Pennsylvania standards alignment

• 5.4.12.B

  Partially covered

  Evaluate the effectiveness of foreign policy tools in various current issues confronting the United States (e.g., diplomacy, economic aid, military aid, sanctions, treaties).

  Covered by

  • BVC: Coca — White Lines
  • BVC: Opioids — The Poppy's Promise
  • BVC: Cannabis — The Green Revolution

  • · Ep 18 · Bolivia's Bet (Bolivia's legal coca model against U.S.-funded eradication)
  • · Ep 18 · The Balloon Effect
  • · Ep 17 · Where the Poppy Grows (Afghanistan and the Golden Crescent)
  • · Ep 16 · The Justice Gap

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: one foreign-policy tool set — the War on Drugs' foreign arm, U.S.-funded eradication and the aid behind it — is taught in depth. The wider toolkit of diplomacy, sanctions, and treaties across current issues 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.