Better Vice Club
Illinois standards alignment
Designed for high school. Below is every Illinoisstandard 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
- 3
- fully covered
- 1
- partially covered
- 3
- 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 Illinois'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: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
- All courses
- BVC: Beer — Liquid Bread
- BVC: Cannabis — The Green Revolution
- 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: My Daily Altar — Season Synthesis
- 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: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message. Clear filters
Illinois · Social Studies
Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science — History, High School (SS.H)
Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science, Grades 9-12 (2017) · Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) · retrieved 2026-07-18
Illinois's History strand is stated as historical-thinking concepts (causation, sources, the struggle for justice) rather than an era survey, which is where the catalog's commodity, labor, civil-rights, and Cold-War history maps.
Read the source document →SS.H.9.9-12
CoveredAnalyze the relationship between historical sources and the secondary interpretations made from them.
Covered by
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
- BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- BVC: Coca — White Lines
- BVC: Whiskey — Fire Water
- BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
- BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
- · 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
- · Ep 10 · The Oral History That Survived (recovering Nathan “Nearest” Green's erased role)
- · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
- · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification
- · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story
Note: Exactly the Whose Voice method: primary accounts read against each other and against the secondary record, and the Nathan “Nearest” Green lesson teaching why the oral and documentary records diverge — source and interpretation held apart on purpose.
Illinois · Social Studies
Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science — Inquiry Skills, High School (SS.IS)
Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science, Grades 9-12 (2017) · Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) · retrieved 2026-07-18
Illinois threads Inquiry Skills through every social-science discipline; the catalog's media-literacy method and the Coffee project's sourced research map onto the source-evaluation and evidence standards.
Read the source document →SS.IS.4.9-12
CoveredGather and evaluate information from multiple sources while considering the origin, credibility, point of view, authority, structure, context, and corroborative value of the sources.
Covered by
- BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
- BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
- BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea
- BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison
- BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
- · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
- · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification
- · 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
- · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, 3+ peer-reviewed sources and an APA bibliography
- · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option C, interview ethics: informed consent, right to review
- · Spotting Misleading Marketing, Lesson 3 · Weasel words and what the fine print takes back
- · Spotting Misleading Marketing, Lesson 5 · Fake reviews, astroturfing, and undisclosed #ads
Note: Source evaluation — origin, credibility, point of view, corroboration — is modelled in every media-literacy episode and required in the Coffee project's sourced, cited research.
SS.IS.5.9-12
Partially coveredIdentify evidence that draws information from multiple sources to revise or strengthen claims.
Covered by
- BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
- BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
- BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf
- BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
- · Ep 15 · Doubt Is Our Product
- · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
- · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence (the UK banning khat against its own scientific advice)
- · Ep 1 · Assignment, all four options are 2-3 week research projects requiring synthesis across sources
What we do and don't cover: Building and testing claims against multiple sources is taught through the fallacy-and-evidence lessons and the Coffee project's synthesis. Only the Coffee episode ships the graded version.
Illinois · English/Language Arts
Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy
Grades 11-12 · Common Core State Standards Initiative · retrieved 2026-07-13
The Illinois State Board of Education adopted the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and mathematics on June 24, 2010, as the Illinois Learning Standards (the “New Illinois Learning Standards Incorporating the Common Core”), with full implementation in 2013-14. Illinois incorporated the CCSS text verbatim under the same code numbering, so the RH/RI/WHST literacy strands this catalog touches are Illinois's ELA standards. We claim no mathematics standards.
Read the source document →CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.8
CoveredEvaluate an author's premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.
Covered by
- · Ep 15 · Doubt Is Our Product
- · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
- · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence (the UK banning khat against its own scientific advice)
- · 3 · The test: four questions before you draw an edge
- · 10 · The source: what Berman v. Parker authorised
- · 1 · The claim, and the two ways it gets abused
- · 6 · How to hold a contested claim: the Black Rice debate
- · 2 · The Olmec: heads, rubber, and a live debate
- · Afrocentricity: How to Evaluate a Contested Paradigm
Note: The BVC value-chain course teaches fallacy-spotting; the route series, the labor and precolonial courses, and Afrocentricity make testing a claim against its sources (corroborating, challenging, or downgrading it) the explicit method of the course.
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 Illinois Common Core (Illinois Learning Standards) mathematics standard.
- Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Illinois adopted the NGSS verbatim (January 2014) as its science standards, 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.
- Financial Literacy (SS.EC.FL) — nothing. Illinois's Economics strand carries a six-standard Financial Literacy sub-strand (income strategies, budgeting, interest and inflation, credit, investing, insurance). This catalog teaches no personal finance, so it claims none of SS.EC.FL.1-6.
- The Illinois Civics flagship's Illinois-specific structure has no Illinois code to cite. Illinois Civics teaches the 1970 Constitution, the plural executive (uniquely both a Comptroller and a Treasurer), the partisan-elected Supreme Court, the uniquely narrow Legislative-Article initiative and the 1980 Cutback Amendment, and one of the nation's strongest home-rule traditions — from Illinois's own official sources. But the 2017 Social Science Standards are DISCIPLINARY CONCEPTS: no standard names a state's structure, so these lessons map only onto the abstract institution and participation standards (SS.CV.1, SS.CV.2, SS.CV.3). The gap is in the standards, not the course.
- Civics standards we checked and rejected. SS.CV.5 (civic dispositions and diverse perspectives as a named concept) and SS.CV.6 (political parties, the media, and public interest groups — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis) are not genuinely taught, so we do not claim them.
- The disciplinary standards we read and did not claim. Across History, Economics, and Geography we claim only the concept standards the catalog genuinely teaches. SS.H.2/4/5/6/11/12, SS.EC.2-4/6-8, and SS.G.1-5/7/9/10 were checked and not claimed — the change-and-continuity, market-mechanics, macroeconomic-indicator, mapping-tool, and culture standards are not this catalog's subject. The reject list is the evidence the map was not padded.
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.