Utah standards alignment

• RH.11-12.6

  Covered

  Evaluate 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: 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

  Covered

  Evaluate an author's premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.

  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)

• RH.11-12.9

  Covered

  Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.

  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: “Noting discrepancies among 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.

• WHST.11-12.7

  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: Partial: only the Coffee episode currently ships a graded research project. Where it runs, it meets this standard squarely.

• WHST.11-12.8

  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 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

  • 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: Partial, same reason as WHST.11-12.7: the Coffee project demands authoritative sources and APA citation, but it is the one graded research project the catalog currently ships.

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. Utah adopted the Common Core State Standards for mathematics, but this catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Utah Core mathematics standard.
• The main ELA reading-informational strand — Utah's 2023 revision diverged from the shared file. Utah adopted the Common Core for ELA, and its disciplinary-literacy strands (RH.11-12.6/8/9 and WHST.11-12.7/8) are verbatim CCSS and mapped above. But Utah's 2023 ELA revision replaced the old reading-informational standard RI.11-12.6 (an author's point of view where the rhetoric is particularly effective) with a reworded standard, Utah's 11-12.R.11, whose text is different. Our rhetoric-of-persuasion work (bvc.rhetoric-power-persuasion) therefore has no verbatim Utah home and is not claimed here; it maps to the disciplinary-literacy standards we do cite, not the general reading-informational strand.
• Science — Utah's SEEd Standards are Utah's own, not verbatim NGSS (deferred). Utah teaches its own SEEd (Science with Engineering Education) Standards — NGSS-influenced but reorganized, and NOT verbatim NGSS — so our shared NGSS file does not apply and we will not alias it. The one Earth-science-adjacent claim other states hang on HS-ESS3-1 (climate and resource availability shaping human activity) is deferred until the SEEd document is fetched and its wording verified against Utah's own codes. There is no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling in this catalog either way.
• U.S. GOV Standard 3.5, 3.6 — the cabinet and administrative rulemaking. Standard 3.5 (how the individual roles of the President's cabinet meet various purposes) and Standard 3.6 (how the administrative rule-making process functions within the federal system) are not genuinely taught by these courses.
• Strand 4 — FISCAL POLICIES AND DECISIONS. Standards 4.1–4.3 (the fiscal decisions governmental agencies make and their guiding economic philosophies, the revenue streams and taxes that fund government, and proposing and defending a budget) are not taught. This catalog does no public-finance or personal-finance instruction.
• U.S. GOV Standard 5.1 and 5.4 — foreign-policy structure and the global-issue argument. Standard 5.1 (the constitutional process of creating foreign policy and the structures — the Department of State, treaties, agreements, alliances — through which the federal government interacts with foreign governments) is not taught. Standard 5.4 (craft an argument for an appropriate role for the United States in a global economic, environmental, or social issue such as humanitarian aid, migration, pandemics, or wildlife habitat) is not claimed: the Coffee project's argument paper is on a global commodity issue, not framed as the United States' role, so we will not stretch it into this standard.
• U.S. GOV Standard 3.3's interest-group half, and the party/lobbying content. We claim Standard 3.3 for how Utahns organize through the dual-path caucus-and-signature system, but not for its interest-group half: political parties as institutions, special-interest groups, lobbying, and evaluating the political impact of those affiliations are not taught (our media-literacy work is consumer protection, not political-media analysis).
• Tribal governments (U.S. GOV Standard 3.1). Standard 3.1 names the distribution of power among national, state, tribal, and local governments, and the course preface notes American Indian tribal governments' unique relationship. Utah Civics teaches Utah's state and local structure but not tribal governments, so Standard 3.1 is claimed as partial and the tribal dimension is not claimed. The gap is in the course, not the standards.
• Utah's own state structure is taught more fully than any one code captures. Utah Civics teaches the dual-path (caucus-convention or signature) nomination system, the 1896 statehood story (polygamy banned, women's suffrage from the start), the joint-ticket Governor and Lieutenant Governor (the latter as chief elections officer), the 45-day part-time Legislature, merit selection with a Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, and all-mail elections — from Utah's own sources. Utah's government course has no dedicated state-structure standard, so Standards 3.1, 3.3, and 3.4 are the generous homes we cite this content under; the 45-day session, the plural executive, and the performance-evaluation-aided retention have no code of their own.