Massachusetts standards alignment

• 8.T7.5

  Partially covered

  Explain methods for evaluating information and opinion in print and online media (e.g., determining the credibility of news articles; analyzing the messages of editorials and op-ed commentaries; assessing the validity of claims and sufficiency of evidence).

  Covered by

  • BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf
  • BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea
  • BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison

  • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
  • · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification
  • · Ep 15 · Doubt Is Our Product
  • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence (the UK banning khat against its own scientific advice)
  • · Ep 1 · Reading a Coffee Ad
  • · Ep 2 · Reading a Tea Ad
  • · Ep 3 · Reading a Chocolate Ad
  • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story (reading a text for what it leaves out)
  • · Ep 11 · Tiki and the Tropical Paradise
  • · Ep 15 · The Language of Doubt

  What we do and don't cover: The skill the standard asks for — determining source credibility and assessing the validity of claims and the sufficiency of evidence — is a recurring method across the curriculum, and a checkable bibliography is published. But it is practiced on advertising, marketing, and historical primary sources rather than on news articles and editorials specifically.

• GOV.T4.5

  Partially covered

  Analyze current research on the impact of media on civic discourse and the importance of an informed citizenry that determines the credibility of sources and claims and exercises other sound media literacy skills.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf
  • BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • BVC: Beer — Liquid Bread
  • BVC: Cannabis — The Green Revolution
  • BVC: Coca — White Lines

  • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
  • · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification
  • · Ep 15 · Doubt Is Our Product
  • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence (the UK banning khat against its own scientific advice)
  • · Ep 1 · Reading a Coffee Ad
  • · Ep 3 · Reading a Chocolate Ad
  • · Ep 8 · Reading a Craft Beer Label
  • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
  • · Ep 16 · Reefer Madness and the Language of Fear
  • · Ep 18 · Just Say No

  What we do and don't cover: Determining the credibility of sources and claims, and other media-literacy skills, are taught throughout the curriculum. But the practice is anchored in consumer marketing and advertising rather than in the civic and political-media discourse this standard targets.

• ECON.T2.10

  Partially covered

  Use concepts of price elasticity of demand and supply to explain and predict changes in quantity as price changes.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

  • · Ep 1 · Price Shocks and Why You Keep Buying
  • · Ep 4 · From Luxury to the Cheapest Calorie

  What we do and don't cover: Price elasticity of demand is taught explicitly — inelastic coffee demand absorbing a sharp price spike — but as one concept in context, not a full elasticity unit covering the supply side with schedules and graphs.

• ECON.T7.8

  Partially covered

  Evaluate the arguments for and against free trade.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea
  • BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • BVC: Tequila & Mezcal — Heart of the Agave
  • BVC: The Toast — Season Synthesis
  • BVC: The Full Spectrum — Who Draws the Line?
  • BVC: My Daily Altar — Season Synthesis
  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

  • · Ep 1 · Follow the Money: Bean to Cup
  • · Ep 2 · Who Gets Paid, Tea and Coffee Compared
  • · Ep 3 · The Commodity Trap
  • · Ep 12 · The Jimador's Share
  • · Ep 14 · Pattern 3: Labor Captures the Smallest Share (the smile curve)
  • · Ep 21 · The Smile Curve, Confirmed
  • · Ep 7 · Who Captures the Value
  • · Ep 4 · The Hidden Costs of Cheap Sugar

  What we do and don't cover: Who wins and who loses from global trade is the series' spine — value captured downstream, the commodity trap, and a protected market's costs. But it is taught as distribution and power along real commodity chains rather than as the formal for-and-against free-trade debate the standard frames.

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:

• The flagship's most distinctive Massachusetts facts have no Massachusetts code to cite. Massachusetts Civics teaches, from the Commonwealth's own sources, the elected Governor's Council that confirms judicial appointments, the appoint-and-serve-to-70 judiciary with no judicial elections, the INDIRECT initiative and the right of free petition, the 2022 VOTES Act's voting on-ramps, and the county governments abolished around 1997–2000. The 2018 framework reaches Massachusetts's government better than most states' standards do — Topic 6 (grade 8) and Topic 2 (US Government elective) name the General Court, the Supreme Judicial Court, town and city government, and the Massachusetts Constitution — but it does not name the Governor's Council, the indirect initiative, the free petition, the VOTES Act, or the county abolition, so those flagship lessons carry no code. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• Mathematics — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Massachusetts mathematics standard.
• Science — Massachusetts's STE Standards are Massachusetts's own, and we did not fetch them. Massachusetts's Science and Technology/Engineering (STE) Standards are the Commonwealth's own — NGSS-influenced but not verbatim NGSS — and they live in a separate framework document we did not retrieve this pass. This catalog has no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling, and our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so Massachusetts gets no science claim — unlike California, where we fetched the document and confirmed a verbatim NGSS performance expectation.
• Topic 1 of grade 8 Civics, and the philosophical/ancient foundations. Grade 8 Topic 1 (the philosophical foundations of the U.S. political system: ancient Athens and Rome, the Enlightenment, British antecedents, the Iroquois Confederacy) and the parallel foundations material in the US Government elective are not what this catalog teaches, so they are not claimed.
• The federal-heavy and Massachusetts-history strands we checked and did not claim. Grade 8 Topics 3 (institutions), 4 (rights and responsibilities), and 5 (amendments and Supreme Court cases) contain many standards beyond the ones listed above — the detailed committee-and-procedure sub-bullets, political-party organization, public-service careers, the specific 14th/19th/26th Amendment items, and the full landmark-case menus — that the courses do not genuinely teach as written. In the electives, Government Topics 4 (parties, PACs, campaign finance) and 5 (foreign affairs and international organizations), and Economics Topics 3–6 (market structures, the role of government, national performance, money and financial institutions) and Personal Financial Literacy, are not claimed. And US History I/II and World History II contain far more than the labor, Prohibition, migration, and imperialism standards we map (the World Wars, the Cold War as a whole, Reconstruction, the New Deal apparatus, the civil-rights movement's full arc). The reject list is the evidence the map was not padded.
• The ELA reading/writing strands beyond the five literacy standards mapped. The grades 11–12 Literacy Standards for History and Social Science include reading standards 1–5, 7, and 10, writing standards 1–6, 9, and 10, and the full Speaking and Listening strand, plus the grades 6–8 and 9–10 bands. We map only the five (RCA-H.6/.8/.9, WCA.7/.8) the catalog genuinely teaches, and the two writing standards only as partial because a sustained composition programme is met by the single Coffee project.