Rhode Island standards alignment

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.8

  Covered

  Evaluate an author's premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Psychedelics — The Mushroom's Message
  • BVC: Khat — The Afternoon Leaf

  • · 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 Rhode Island Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Rhode Island was the first state to adopt the NGSS (spring 2013) and reaffirmed it in 2024, 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.
• The Narragansett and other tribal governments (SSHS.CVC.4.5). Rhode Island's SSHS.CVC.4.5 names tribal governments and the Narragansett explicitly, and requires students to analyze the powers and structures of tribal governments and the relationships between the Narragansett and Rhode Island's state and local governments. Rhode Island Civics teaches Rhode Island's state and local structure in depth but does not teach the Narragansett Tribe's government, so SSHS.CVC.4.5 is claimed as partial. The gap is in the course, not the standard.
• Rhode Island's own state structure is taught more fully than SSHS.CVC.4.5 captures. Rhode Island Civics teaches the 1843 constitution and the 2020 removal of “and Providence Plantations,” the two-tier system with 5 counties but NO county governments and 39 all-purpose cities and towns, the long legislative-supremacy tradition and the 2004 separation-of-powers amendment that reined it in, the plural executive with a separately elected Lieutenant Governor, the 75-member House and 38-member Senate with a veto overridable by only three-fifths (and no line-item veto), and the only state Supreme Court whose justices serve for life — all from Rhode Island's own sources. SSHS.CVC.4.5 hosts most of it, but this bespoke 2023 civics frame is inquiry-and-argument based, not a Rhode-Island-government checklist, so the life-tenure court, the 2004 reform, and the 2020 name change have no code of their own.
• The comparative-government, political-science, and world-affairs standards we checked and rejected. The standards the courses do not genuinely teach are not claimed: SSHS.CVC.1.1 (the history and philosophy of different forms of government), SSHS.CVC.2.1 (18th-century philosophical ideas / the Enlightenment thinkers and the American Revolution), SSHS.CVC.2.2 (Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence), SSHS.CVC.3.3 (how the Constitution handled the system of slavery — the Three-Fifths and Fugitive Slave clauses), all of Inquiry Topic 5's party/interest-group standards except the participation standard (SSHS.CVC.5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.5 — money, media, and polling in politics), SSHS.CVC.7.3 (contemporary policy debates such as mass incarceration, gun ownership, affordable housing, and immigration), and all of Inquiry Topic 8 (SSHS.CVC.8.1-8.3 — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.S. human-rights interventions and genocides, and global citizenship). Rhode Island's own deep history in the North American slave trade would be a natural home for SSHS.CVC.3.3, but the course does not teach it, so we do not claim it.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Rhode Island's closest frameworks for these (its digital-literacy/computer-science and world-languages standards) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Rhode Island claims this pass.