Better Vice Club
Michigan standards alignment
Designed for high school. Below is every Michiganstandard 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.
- 6
- standards mapped
- 5
- fully covered
- 1
- 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 Michigan'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.
Filter by course
- 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: 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: Tobacco — Sacred Smoke
- BVC: Whiskey — Fire Water
Showing 6 standards in English/Language Arts. Clear filters
Michigan · English/Language Arts
Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy
Grades 11-12 · Common Core State Standards Initiative · retrieved 2026-07-13
Michigan adopted the Common Core State Standards for English language arts as the Michigan K-12 Standards for English Language Arts, approved by the State Board of Education in 2010. Michigan's document reproduces the CCSS text VERBATIM but prints the strands under the bare CCSS codes (RH.11-12.6, WHST.11-12.7, …) without the “CCSS.ELA-Literacy” web namespace, so the codes here are aliased to Michigan's printed form. We compared the RH/RI/WHST grade 11-12 standards against Michigan's own document (Wayback snapshot 20250430151740, 2025-04-30) and the wording is identical. We claim no mathematics standards.
Read the source document →RH.11-12.6
CoveredEvaluate authors' differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and evidence.
Covered by
- BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
- BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
- BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
- BVC: Coca — White Lines
- · 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
Note: The strongest single alignment on this page. Ep 4 puts a planter's euphemism and passive voice directly against two first-person accounts by formerly enslaved writers, and teaches the student to assess each author's claims and evidence.
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.
RI.11-12.6
CoveredDetermine an author's point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness or beauty of the text.
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
WHST.11-12.7
CoveredConduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
Covered by
- · Ep 1 · Assignment, all four options are 2-3 week research projects requiring synthesis across sources
- · 19 · Your assignment: find a listing, then find the address today
- · 20 · Your assignment: write one block
- · 21 · Your assignment: write one firm
- · 21 · Your assignment: test one connection of your own
- · 17 · Your assignment: one schoolhouse, and the budget line that raised it
- · 20 · Your assignment: write one property
Note: The Coffee episode ships a graded assignment; the route series and the positive-track courses each close with a research capstone (find a listing, write one firm, test one connection) in which the student runs a self-directed inquiry and synthesizes multiple sources.
WHST.11-12.8
CoveredGather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the strengths and limitations of each source in terms of the specific task, purpose, and audience; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation.
Covered by
- · 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
- · 19 · Your assignment: find a listing, then find the address today
- · 20 · Your assignment: write one block
- · 21 · Your assignment: write one firm
- · 21 · Your assignment: test one connection of your own
- · 17 · Your assignment: one schoolhouse, and the budget line that raised it
- · 20 · Your assignment: write one property
Note: The route and positive-track capstones require the student to locate a primary record, corroborate it across independent sources, weigh each source's limits, and write it up with citations: the whole of this standard.
RH.11-12.9
Partially coveredIntegrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.
Covered by
- · Ep 10 · The Oral History That Survived (recovering Nathan “Nearest” Green's erased role)
- · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story
- · 2 · How we know: reading a record the enslavers wrote
- · 2 · The center of gravity: the claim, its sources, and its caveats
- · 9 · Reading density: what a thick section and a thin one mean
- · 8 · The Lula record, stated as dated fact
- · Africa Before Colonization: The Documented Record
What we do and don't cover: Full in the BVC Nathan Green lesson, where the documentary and oral records openly disagree. Partial across the catalog-wide claim: every one of those courses integrates cited primary and secondary sources into a coherent account (the standard's first clause), and the route, labor, and contested-scholarship courses also foreground where the sources disagree, but the narrative histories (bathing, hoodoo) integrate sources without making discrepancy-resolution a systematic exercise.
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 Michigan Common Core (Michigan K-12) mathematics standard.
- Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Michigan adopted the NGSS verbatim as the Michigan Science Standards (November 10, 2015), 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.
- Michigan's World History, U.S. History, Economics, and Geography strands — deferred, not denied. The catalog's commodity, colonial, labor, civil-rights, and Cold-War history and its commodity economics WOULD map to Michigan's high-school World History (WHG), U.S. History (USHG), Economics (E), and Geography (G) strands, as they do in other states. But those strands sit in the 2019 document's multi-column, era-based layout, and the PDF's subset-font encoding makes clean verbatim transcription of that layout unreliable. Our rule is verbatim-or-nothing, so we mapped the High School Civics strand (which decoded cleanly and was verified) this pass and DEFER the other social-studies strands rather than risk citing text we cannot cleanly verify.
- Tribal governments (C3.2.3, C3.2.4). Michigan's C3.2 cluster names tribal governments and tribal sovereignty (C3.2.4 is entirely about it). Michigan Civics teaches Michigan's state and local structure but not tribal governments, so C3.2.3 is claimed as partial and C3.2.4 is not claimed. The gap is in the course, not the standards.
- Michigan's own state structure is taught more fully than any one code captures. Michigan Civics teaches the 1963 Constitution, the nonpartisan-ballot-but-party-nominated Supreme Court, the joint-ticket Lieutenant Governor with a separately elected Secretary of State and Attorney General, term limits (Proposal 1 of 2022), and the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission — from Michigan's own sources. C3.2.3 (how state/local governments are organized) and C3.2.6 (initiative/referendum/recall) host most of it, but the judicial-selection quirk and the redistricting commission's design have no code of their own beyond the direct-democracy mechanism that created it.
- The federal-heavy and political-science civics standards we checked and rejected. C1.1.1-1.1.4 (political philosophy and systems of government), C2.1.1-2.1.3 (the founding debates and origins as named content), C2.2.1-2.2.3 (the Democratic Values ↔ Constitutional Principles pairing), C3.1.6 (federal revenue and expenditure), C3.3.1-3.3.6 (interest groups, parties, public opinion, campaigns, NGOs, and media types — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis), all of C4 (the Bill of Rights and civil-rights case lists — touched only through Know Your Rights, a thin overlap), all of C5 (U.S. foreign policy and international institutions), C6.1.2/6.1.3 (the expansion of citizenship and territorial/tribal representation), C6.3.1 (civic dispositions as a named concept), and C6.4.1/6.4.2 (the pursuit of Democratic Values and a survey of civil disobedience and social movements) — the courses do not genuinely teach these, so we do not claim them.
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.