New Jersey standards alignment

• RI.PP.11–12.5

  Covered

  Analyze an author’s purpose in a text distinguishing what is directly stated in a text or through rhetoric, analyzing how style and content convey information and advance a point of view.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
  • BVC: Opioids — The Poppy's Promise
  • BVC: Cannabis — The Green Revolution

  • · Ep 4 · Blood-Sweetened Luxury
  • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
  • · Ep 17 · Lin Zexu's Letter
  • · Ep 16 · Three Sentences, Three Policies

  Note: New Jersey's revised version of Common Core RI.11-12.6. Determining an author's purpose in a text where the rhetoric is doing the work — how style and content advance a point of view — is taught directly through the reading-the-ads and rhetoric lessons.

• RI.AA.11–12.7

  Covered

  Describe and evaluate the reasoning in seminal U.S. and global texts, and the premises, purposes, and arguments in these works.

  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)

  Note: New Jersey's version of Common Core RH.11-12.8. Evaluating an author's premises, claims, and reasoning — corroborating or challenging them — is taught as a transferable skill.

• 6.2.12.HistoryCC.1.f

  Partially covered

  Assess the political, social, and economic impact of the interactions between indigenous peoples and colonizers over different time periods (e.g., Columbian Exchange, forced labor, slave trade and slavery practices, spread of disease, lingering effects on cultures).

  Covered by

  • BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison
  • BVC: Tequila & Mezcal — Heart of the Agave
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke

  • · Ep 3 · Conquest and the Great Reversal
  • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
  • · Ep 11 · The Triangular Trade
  • · Ep 12 · Burning the Books (the destruction of the Mesoamerican codices)
  • · Ep 15 · From Sacred to Commodity
  • · Ep 3 · Food of the Gods (cacao as Maya/Aztec currency and sacrament)
  • · Ep 12 · The Sacred Plant (Aztec governance of pulque)
  • · Ep 12 · Burning the Books

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: the Columbian exchange, conquest, and the colonization of Mesoamerica (Maya and Aztec) through the plants those societies governed are taught in depth. The standard's full sweep of every named interaction is broader than the courses.

• 6.2.12.EconGE.1.b

  Partially covered

  Assess the role of mercantilism in stimulating European expansion through trade, conquest, and colonization.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • BVC: Rum — Sweet Poison
  • BVC: Tequila & Mezcal — Heart of the Agave
  • BVC: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke

  • · Ep 3 · Conquest and the Great Reversal
  • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
  • · Ep 11 · The Triangular Trade
  • · Ep 12 · Burning the Books (the destruction of the Mesoamerican codices)
  • · Ep 15 · From Sacred to Commodity

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: conquest and colonization as engines of European expansion are taught through the commodities and the Columbian exchange. The formal concept of mercantilism, by name, is not a unit.

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 Jersey mathematics standard.
• Science — almost nothing. There is no laboratory work, no investigation and no scientific modelling here. New Jersey adopted the NGSS verbatim (as NJSLS-Science, 2014), and we claim a single NGSS performance expectation, partially, explaining exactly why on the entry itself. It is not a science course and we will not sell it as one.
• The flagship's distinctive New Jersey structure has mostly no code to cite. New Jersey Civics teaches the deliberately strong Governor (who appoints the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Treasurer rather than voters electing them), the Lieutenant Governor created only in 2010, the appointed judiciary that earns tenure to age 70, the 40-district Legislature on its 2-4-4 Senate cycle, the absence of any citizen initiative, and the 21 counties whose boards were renamed from “Chosen Freeholders” to “county commissioners” in 2020-2021. New Jersey's 2020 standards reach the New Jersey Constitution of 1776 and 1947 (6.1.12.CivicsPI.2.a, .13.a), which the flagship backs, but the strong-governor design, the appointed judiciary, the no-initiative rule, and the county renaming have no New Jersey-specific code. The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• The Opium Wars, the sugar-vs-other-commodities split, and the War on Drugs. The catalog teaches the Opium Wars and the War on Drugs in depth, and covers sugar thoroughly. New Jersey's world-history standard names sugar and cotton (6.2.12.EconGE.1.a), so we claim the sugar content there — but it does not name the Opium Wars, and New Jersey's Active Citizenship history standards reach contemporary drug policy only through the broad “current foreign policy issue” framing (6.3.12.HistoryCA.12), which the courses do not squarely meet. We leave those unclaimed rather than stretch.
• The Amistad and climate-change teaching mandates. New Jersey law requires the Amistad curriculum (the history of the African slave trade and of African Americans) and climate-change education across subjects. These are instructional mandates layered onto the standards, not separate coded standards, so there is no distinct code to cite; the catalog's slavery, abolition, and climate content is claimed through the coded 6.1/6.2 standards above.
• The wider catalog — health, PE, AI-literacy, and languages. New Jersey's relevant frameworks for these (Comprehensive Health and Physical Education; Computer Science and Design Thinking; World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no New Jersey claims this pass.