Better Vice Club
New York standards alignment
Designed for high school. Below is every New Yorkstandard these courses cover: the exact code, the standard's own words, and the lesson that covers it. Where we only cover part of a standard, it says so, and says which part.
- 4
- standards mapped
- 1
- fully covered
- 3
- partially covered
- 2
- frameworks
Read this before you rely on it
- We mapped this ourselves. This alignment was done by Better Vice Club against the published standards. It has not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by New York's education authority or by anyone else.
- Every code was fetched, then transcribed word for word. Each framework below shows the date its codes and text were retrieved from the publisher.
- Standards get revised.A code can be renumbered or its wording changed without notice, and some states publish more than one live edition of the same document. Confirm anything you file against your own jurisdiction's current requirements, using the source links below.
- We would rather claim less. Where the courses only partly cover a standard, this page says partially covered and explains the gap. Standards we considered and could not honestly claim are listed at the bottom, with the reasons.
Filtering by course: BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- All courses
- BVC: Beer — Liquid Bread
- BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
- BVC: Coca — White Lines
- BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
- BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- BVC: Kava — The Root of Peace
- BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf
- BVC: Opioids — The Poppy's Promise
- BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
- BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea
- BVC: Tequila & Mezcal — Heart of the Agave
- BVC: The Full Spectrum — Who Draws the Line?
- BVC: The Toast — Season Synthesis
- BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
- BVC: Whiskey — Fire Water
Showing 4 standards covered by BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom. Clear filters
New York · Social Studies
New York State K-12 Social Studies Framework — Grade 10: Global History and Geography II
Grades 9-12 Framework · New York State Education Department (NYSED) / Board of Regents · retrieved 2026-07-17
New York's second year of global history (1750–present). The imperialism Key Idea (10.4) is the strongest home for the Commodity Map's imperial-and-colonial lessons.
Read the source document →10.4a
Partially coveredEuropean industrialized states and Japan sought to play a dominant role in the world and to control natural resources for political, economic, and cultural reasons.
Covered by
- BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea
- BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- BVC: Kava — The Root of Peace
- BVC: Opioids — The Poppy's Promise
- BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf
- BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
- BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- · Ep 2 · Who Grows the Tea (colonial and plantation labour)
- · Ep 5 · Whose Knowledge Is It
- · Ep 6 · Kava Governs
- · Ep 17 · The Opium Wars
- · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence
- · The Commodity Map itself, every episode pinned at its origin
- · The Growing Belts map, production regions by latitude band and country
- · Ep 1 · The Coffee Belt: Where Coffee Grows and Why
- · Ep 3 · The Cacao Tree and the Narrowest Belt
- · Ep 6 · Why Volcanic Soil Only
What we do and don't cover: Partial: imperial control of natural resources across Africa and Asia is exactly the Commodity Map's method — the cash-crop and resource systems the imperial powers ran, taught from multiple perspectives. The standard's specific direct/indirect-rule case list (South Africa, Congo, India, Indochina, China) is not worked territory by territory.
10.4b
Partially coveredThose who faced being colonized engaged in varying forms of resistance and adaptation to colonial rule with varying degrees of success.
Covered by
- BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea
- BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- BVC: Kava — The Root of Peace
- BVC: Opioids — The Poppy's Promise
- BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison
- · Ep 2 · Who Grows the Tea (colonial and plantation labour)
- · Ep 5 · Whose Knowledge Is It
- · Ep 6 · Kava Governs
- · Ep 17 · The Opium Wars
- · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence
- · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
- · Ep 4 · Resistance and Revolution
- · Ep 11 · The Maroons
- · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution
What we do and don't cover: Partial: resistance to imperial and colonial systems is taught — from Maroon communities to revolution and abolition — but the standard's named African and Chinese examples (Zulu, Ethiopia, Taiping/Boxer Rebellions) are not the courses' cases.
New York · English/Language Arts
New York State Next Generation Learning Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects — Grades 11-12
Grades 11-12 · Revised 2017 · New York State Education Department (NYSED) / Board of Regents · retrieved 2026-07-17
New York's revision of the Common Core content-area literacy standards. Codes are New York's grade-banded Reading-in-History (RH) and Writing-in-History/Science/Technical (WHST) standards, transcribed verbatim from the Grades 11-12 band. New York renamed and revised these from Common Core, so we map New York's own text rather than aliasing the shared Common Core file (see the file header). This history/social-studies catalog does not touch the science/technical (RST) literacy strand.
Read the source document →RH6
CoveredEvaluate authors' points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and evidence.
Covered by
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
- BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- BVC: Coca — White Lines
- · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story, Beckford (1790) against Equiano (1789) and Mary Prince (1831) on the same plantation world
- · Ep 3 · Two Ways of Seeing a Bean
- · Ep 5 · Two Ways of Knowing
- · Ep 18 · Whose Voice
Note: The strongest single ELA alignment. Ep 4 puts a planter's euphemism and passive voice directly against two first-person accounts by formerly enslaved writers, and teaches the student to assess each author's claims and evidence. (New York's RH6 drops Common Core's word “differing”; the text above is New York's own.)
RH3
Partially coveredEvaluate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain.
Covered by
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
- BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- BVC: Coca — White Lines
- · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story, Beckford (1790) against Equiano (1789) and Mary Prince (1831) on the same plantation world
- · Ep 3 · Two Ways of Seeing a Bean
- · Ep 5 · Two Ways of Knowing
- · Ep 18 · Whose Voice
What we do and don't cover: Partial: evaluating competing accounts of the same events against their evidence is the Whose Voice method. The standard's “acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain” is not itself a focus of the lessons.
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 New York Next Generation mathematics standard.
- Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. New York adopted the NGSS verbatim as the P-12 Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS, December 2016), so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. We verified the performance-expectation text against NYSED's own High School science document; it is identical to the NGSS. There is no laboratory work, no investigation, and no modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
- The Opium Wars and the Haitian Revolution — New York's framework never names them. The catalog teaches both in depth (the Opium Wars and Lin Zexu's letter; the Haitian Revolution through to the 1825 indemnity). We searched the full Grades 9-12 Social Studies Framework and it contains no Key Idea on either — unlike Washington, D.C., whose standards name them explicitly (WH2.53, WH2.40). The gap is in New York's standards, not the lessons.
- The New York Civics flagship's structure lessons have mostly no New York code to cite. New York Civics: How Your State Government Works teaches New York's 1894 constitution and its automatic 20-year convention question, the plural executive (a separately-elected Attorney General and Comptroller), the famously inverted court names (the “Supreme Court” is the TRIAL court), the 62 counties with New York City's five borough-counties, and the absence of any statewide citizen initiative — from New York's own official sources. But the Grade 12 Participation in Government framework is overwhelmingly FEDERAL: state government enters only through 12.G1b (state constitutions and their localities), 12.G4d (which names New York's party system), and the public-policy standards 12.G5a/12.G5c — which the course backs. The inverted court names, the plural executive, the 20-year convention question, and the no-initiative rule have no code to cite. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
- The Great Migration and the labor movement have no single Key Idea of their own. Two entire courses teach the Great Migration and the American labor movement, but New York's framework distributes their content across Key Ideas about their eras (11.4a's Reconstruction, 11.5b's Progressive-Era reform, 11.6c's WWI effects, 11.10a's civil-rights movement, and the economics standard 12.E3b) rather than giving either its own standard. We map only where the framework names their people and events, and we mark those partial. The catalog's depth on both exceeds what any one New York Key Idea asks.
- Personal finance and macroeconomic measurement (Economics 12.E1, 12.E4a-c). Budgeting, credit, investment, inflation, GDP/GNP/CPI, and fiscal and monetary policy were checked against the Grade 12 Economics framework and are not genuinely taught by these courses. We claim only the labor-market, market-mechanics, and trade-policy standards the catalog actually reaches.
- The rest of the Grade 11 U.S. History framework. Colonial and constitutional foundations (11.1-11.2), expansion and sectionalism (11.3), the rise of American power and WWI beyond the Great Migration (11.6), World War II (11.8), the Cold War beyond the Eastern-Europe collapse (11.9a-c), the post-1965 domestic movements (11.10b-c), and the globalizing world (11.11) are not genuinely taught by this catalog, so we do not claim them.
- The science/technical (RST) literacy strand and the general ELA reading/writing standards. New York publishes a separate Reading in Science and Technical Subjects (RST) literacy strand and a general ELA reading/writing set. This catalog's honest literacy home is the Reading and Writing in History/Social Studies (RH/WHST) strand, mapped above; the RST science-literacy standards and the general ELA standards are not claimed here.
- The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. New York's closest frameworks (the Computer Science and Digital Fluency Standards, and the World Languages standards) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no New York claims this pass.
See it for yourself
Don't take the mapping on trust. Open the lesson and check it against the standard. Every course publishes its sources too.