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.

• RI.MF.11–12.6

  Covered

  Synthesize complex information across multiple sources and formats to develop ideas, resolve conflicting information, or develop an interpretation that goes beyond explicit text information (e.g., express a personal point of view, new interpretation of the concept).

  Covered by

  • BVC: Whiskey — Fire Water
  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

  • · Ep 10 · The Oral History That Survived (recovering Nathan “Nearest” Green's erased role)
  • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story

  Note: New Jersey's version of Common Core RH.11-12.9. “Resolve conflicting information” across sources is the whole point of the Nathan Green lesson: the documentary record and the oral record disagree, and the episode teaches why oral history is a legitimate scholarly method for resolving that.

• RI.CT.11–12.8

  Covered

  Analyze and reflect on (e.g., practical knowledge, historical/cultural context, and background knowledge) documents of historical and scientific significance for their purposes, including primary source documents relevant to U.S. and/or global history and texts proposing scientific or technical advancements.

  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: Analyzing primary-source documents of historical significance for their purpose is the Whose Voice method: a planter's euphemism and passive voice set against two first-person accounts by formerly enslaved writers.

• W.WR.11–12.5

  Partially covered

  Conduct 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

  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection

  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, all four options are 2-3 week research projects requiring synthesis across sources

  What we do and don't cover: New Jersey's near-verbatim recoding of Common Core WHST.11-12.7. Partial: only the Coffee episode currently ships a graded research assignment. Where it runs, it meets this standard squarely.

• W.SE.11–12.6

  Partially covered

  Gather 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 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 (MLA or APA Style Manuals).

  Covered by

  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection

  • · 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

  What we do and don't cover: New Jersey's near-verbatim recoding of Common Core WHST.11-12.8. Partial, same reason as W.WR.11-12.5: the Coffee project's graded options require gathering authoritative sources with an APA bibliography, but it is the only graded assignment currently shipping.

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.