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Better Vice Club

Washington, D.C. standards alignment

Designed for high school. Below is every Washington, D.C.standard 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.

8
standards mapped
3
fully covered
5
partially covered
1
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 Washington, D.C.'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

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Showing 8 standards in Social Studies. Clear filters

Washington, D.C. · Social Studies

Washington, DC K-12 Social Studies Standards

June 2023 · Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) · retrieved 2026-07-13

Common Core never covered social studies, so DC wrote its own. These are the high-school course codes: WH1 (World History I), WH2 (World History II), US2 (US History II).

Read the source document →

  • WH2.15

    Covered
    Compare different forms of European colonization and enslavement, such as in plantation-based societies and economies across the Americas and the Caribbean, and resistance to such enslavement.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
    • · Ep 4 · Resistance and Revolution
    • · Ep 11 · The Maroons
    • · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution

    Note: Both halves of the standard are covered: the plantation economy itself, and resistance to it (Maroon communities, the Haitian Revolution, revolt and abolition).

  • WH2.40

    Covered
    Analyze the social, political and economic factors that contributed to the Haitian Revolution, and evaluate the impact of the Haitian revolution on Haiti and global events.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution
    • · Ep 11 · The Debt of Freedom
    • · Ep 11 · The Black Jacobins (C.L.R. James)

    Note: Including the standard's second half, which most curricula skip: the 1825 French indemnity, and the line from it to Haiti's poverty today.

  • WH2.53

    Covered
    Analyze the Opium Wars' impact on China's political, economic and social systems, and evaluate the global consequences of the Opium Wars.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 17 · The Opium Wars
    • · Ep 17 · Lin Zexu's Letter

  • WH2.37

    Partially covered
    Evaluate the impact of the silver trade, spice trade, cotton trade and sugar industry on different societies and individuals during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 4 · The Sugar Islands
    • · Ep 4 · From New Guinea to the New World
    • · Ep 11 · Waste-Product Economics

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: of the four trades the standard names, this curriculum covers the SUGAR INDUSTRY — thoroughly. It does not teach the silver, spice or cotton trades.

  • WH2.13

    Partially covered
    Analyze government structures, technological innovations and geographical features of empires and city states across the Americas to evaluate the drastic impact of European colonization on Indigenous societies, including the Aztec and Incan Empires.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 3 · Food of the Gods (cacao as Maya/Aztec currency and sacrament)
    • · Ep 3 · Conquest and the Great Reversal
    • · Ep 12 · The Sacred Plant (Aztec governance of pulque)
    • · Ep 12 · Burning the Books

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: Mesoamerica (Maya and Aztec) is covered in real depth, through the plants those societies governed. The Incan Empire is not covered, and the standard names it explicitly.

  • WH2.18

    Partially covered
    Evaluate primary source accounts of the Middle Passage to analyze the dehumanizing experience forced upon enslaved people and the ways in which individuals worked to maintain humanity and dignity in the face of mass atrocity.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
    • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story (Equiano, 1789; Mary Prince, 1831)

    What we do and don't cover: Partial, and the distinction is worth being exact about: the episode teaches the Middle Passage, and it does evaluate primary-source accounts by formerly enslaved writers (Equiano, Prince). But that primary-source work centres plantation labour rather than the crossing itself. The Middle Passage is taught from secondary sources.

  • WH1.15

    Partially covered
    Analyze the role of agricultural, technological and cultural innovations in the emergence and maintenance of early complex societies between 10,000 BCE and 500 BCE.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 8 · Liquid Bread and the First Cities (the Code of Hammurabi, c. 1754 BCE, legislates beer)
    • · Ep 9 · Wine, Power, and the Sacred

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: fermentation is used as the way into early complex societies, and it falls inside the standard's window. It is one thread through that period, not a survey of it.

  • US2.79

    Partially covered
    Evaluate the effort of American foreign policy to meet humanitarian goals, further economic interests, and increase domestic security, including the War on Drugs and the invasion of Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 18 · Bolivia's Bet (Bolivia's legal coca model against U.S.-funded eradication)
    • · Ep 18 · The Balloon Effect
    • · Ep 17 · Where the Poppy Grows (Afghanistan and the Golden Crescent)
    • · Ep 16 · The Justice Gap

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: the War on Drugs half is covered in depth, including its foreign-policy arm. The invasion of Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror are not taught — the curriculum reaches Afghanistan through opium geography, not through the war.

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 curriculum does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Common Core mathematics standard.
  • Science — almost nothing. There is no laboratory work, no investigation and no scientific modelling here. We claim a single NGSS performance expectation, partially, and we explain exactly why on the entry itself. It is not a science course and we will not sell it as one.
  • Prohibition and mass incarceration. The curriculum teaches both. D.C.'s 2023 social studies standards contain no standard on either (we searched the full document), so there is nothing for us to cite. The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
  • D.C.'s economics and geography strands. In the 2023 document these are un-numbered “statements of practice”, not coded standards. There is no code to cite, so we cite none — even though the economics content lines up well.
  • The wider catalog — not yet mapped for D.C. The civics, U.S. history, health, and PE mapping done for Indiana has not been repeated against D.C.'s frameworks yet. D.C. currently carries the Commodity Map alignment only; the catalog-wide pass is queued.

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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