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Better Vice Club

Massachusetts standards alignment

Designed for high school. Below is every Massachusettsstandard 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.

3
standards mapped
0
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 Massachusetts'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.

Subject

Filtering by course: BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison

Showing 3 standards in Social Studies covered by BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison. Clear filters

Massachusetts · Social Studies

History and Social Science Framework — Grade 8: United States and Massachusetts Government and Civic Life (Civics)

2018 Massachusetts Curriculum Framework (adopted June 2018) · Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) / Board of Elementary and Secondary Education · retrieved 2026-07-18

Massachusetts requires a full-year grade 8 Civics course, and a student-led civics project, under Chapter 296 of the Acts of 2018. This is where Massachusetts Civics — the flagship, written from Massachusetts's own sources — is mapped, especially Topic 6 (the structure of Massachusetts state and local government), which names the Commonwealth's own institutions. The federal-government topics are mapped to the general civics ladder. Codes are cited grade.topic.item (8.T6.8), DESE's own convention.

Read the source document →

  • 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

    • · 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.

Massachusetts · Social Studies

History and Social Science Framework — High School: World History II

2018 Massachusetts Curriculum Framework (adopted June 2018) · Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) / Board of Elementary and Secondary Education · retrieved 2026-07-18

World History II (c. 1800 to the present) is where the BVC series' colonial and commodity history maps — the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies, and 19th-century imperialism including the opium trade between India and China. Codes are cited as the combined topic tag plus item (WHII.T3.3).

Read the source document →

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.

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.

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