Skip to content

Better Vice Club

Virginia standards alignment

Designed for high school. Below is every Virginiastandard 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.

12
standards mapped
0
fully covered
12
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 Virginia'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

Virginia · Social Studies

Virginia and United States Government — 2023 History and Social Science Standards of Learning

2023 · Board-approved April 20, 2023 (Grade 12 Government) · Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) / Virginia Board of Education · retrieved 2026-07-18

Virginia's Grade 12 civics anchor course, defining the knowledge that enables citizens to participate in civic and economic life. The 2023 SOL use the GOVT.* prefix across a content-neutral Skills strand and GOVT.1-GOVT.14. The course is overwhelmingly about the federal system, but GOVT.10 names Virginia's own state and local government 'as described in the Constitution of Virginia', so the Virginia flagship course is mapped there (full). Sub-standards are cited by their printed letter (GOVT.10a); where a standard's clause is too short to stand alone, the stem is cited instead.

Read the source document →

  • Skills GOVT c

    Partially covered
    questioning and using inquiry to construct arguments using evidence from multiple sources

    Covered by

    • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option D, a 1,200-1,500 word research paper with a required counterargument section
    • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
    • · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: multi-source argument construction is modelled throughout and required in the Coffee project's argument paper (with a counterargument section), but graded student practice is limited to that one project.

  • Skills GOVT j

    Partially covered
    contextualizing corroborating and evaluating sources for credibility, propaganda, and bias to determine patterns and trends in Virginia and United States government and politics

    Covered by

    • · Ep 19 · Peer Review Versus Press Release
    • · Every course's Sources bibliography, with per-claim verification
    • · Ep 1 · Reading a Coffee Ad
    • · Ep 2 · Reading a Tea Ad
    • · Ep 3 · Reading a Chocolate Ad
    • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story (reading a text for what it leaves out)
    • · Ep 11 · Tiki and the Tropical Paradise
    • · Ep 15 · The Language of Doubt
    • · Ep 15 · Doubt Is Our Product
    • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence (the UK banning khat against its own scientific advice)

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: evaluating sources for credibility, propaganda, and bias is a BVC through-line (reading an ad for what it omits, an industry's manufactured doubt, weighing conflicting accounts against each other) — modelled in every episode, graded only in the Coffee project.

  • GOVT.6d

    Partially covered
    analyzing the influence of media coverage, campaign advertising, public opinion polls, social media, and digital communications

    Covered by

    • · Ep 1 · Reading a Coffee Ad
    • · Ep 3 · Reading a Chocolate Ad
    • · Ep 8 · Reading a Craft Beer Label
    • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
    • · Ep 16 · Reefer Madness and the Language of Fear
    • · Ep 18 · Just Say No
    • · Spotting Misleading Marketing, Lesson 3 · Weasel words and what the fine print takes back
    • · Spotting Misleading Marketing, Lesson 5 · Fake reviews, astroturfing, and undisclosed #ads
    • · How to Help a Campaign · the whole course (volunteering, donating, canvassing, with the legal guardrails)

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: analyzing persuasion and advertising is a BVC strength (Torches of Freedom, reading ads for omission) and the campaign course teaches campaigning lawfully; political public-opinion polling and a general media-influence analysis are not the frame.

  • GOVT.12a

    Partially covered
    describing the responsibilities of the national government for foreign policy and national security

    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: foreign policy is taught through one deep case — the foreign-policy arm of the War on Drugs (Bolivia's model against U.S.-funded eradication, the Golden Crescent) — not as a general treatment of foreign-policy and national-security responsibilities.

  • GOVT.12c

    Partially covered
    examining the relationship of Virginia and the United States in the global economy, including trends in international trade

    Covered by

    • · Ep 1 · Follow the Money: Bean to Cup
    • · Ep 2 · Who Gets Paid, Tea and Coffee Compared
    • · Ep 3 · The Commodity Trap
    • · Ep 12 · The Jimador's Share
    • · Ep 14 · Pattern 3: Labor Captures the Smallest Share (the smile curve)
    • · Ep 21 · The Smile Curve, Confirmed
    • · Ep 7 · Who Captures the Value
    • · Ep 4 · The Hidden Costs of Cheap Sugar
    • · The Commodity Map itself, every episode pinned at its origin
    • · The Growing Belts map, production regions by latitude band and country
    • · Ep 1 · The Coffee Belt: Where Coffee Grows and Why
    • · Ep 3 · The Cacao Tree and the Narrowest Belt
    • · Ep 6 · Why Volcanic Soil Only

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: the United States in the global commodity economy is taught in real depth (value chains, the sugar program's trade barriers, the growing belts that drive trade); Virginia's specific role in the global economy is not.

  • GOVT.13a

    Partially covered
    evaluate the economic and political systems of capitalism, communism, Marxism, socialism, fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism

    Covered by

    • · Ep 5 · The Reciprocity Economy
    • · Ep 6 · Ceremony Meets the Market
    • · Ep 7 · Two Ways of Doing Economics
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 3 · A workers' state with a worker problem
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 7 · 13 December 1981: the state answers (martial law)
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 8 · 1989: a union negotiates a state out of existence

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: reciprocity economies against market economies (directly, at length) and a communist workers' state against the union that unmade it (Solidarność) are taught; a survey of all the named systems is not.

  • GOVT.13c

    Partially covered
    comparing and contrasting the role of government in capitalism and socialism as economic systems, including the role of government in each and individual economic freedoms

    Covered by

    • · Ep 5 · The Reciprocity Economy
    • · Ep 6 · Ceremony Meets the Market
    • · Ep 7 · Two Ways of Doing Economics
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 3 · A workers' state with a worker problem
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 7 · 13 December 1981: the state answers (martial law)
    • · Poland: Solidarność, Lesson 8 · 1989: a union negotiates a state out of existence

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: the role of government in a market versus a command economy is taught through the reciprocity/market contrast and martial-law Poland; a systematic capitalism-versus-socialism comparison is not.

  • GOVT.13e

    Partially covered
    evaluating the factors that influence production and distribution of goods in a market system

    Covered by

    • · Ep 1 · Price Shocks and Why You Keep Buying
    • · Ep 4 · From Luxury to the Cheapest Calorie
    • · The Commodity Map itself, every episode pinned at its origin
    • · The Growing Belts map, production regions by latitude band and country
    • · Ep 1 · The Coffee Belt: Where Coffee Grows and Why
    • · Ep 3 · The Cacao Tree and the Narrowest Belt
    • · Ep 6 · Why Volcanic Soil Only

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: what moves prices (inelastic demand absorbing a price spike) and where goods can be produced (the growing belts) are taught through commodity markets; a general production-and-distribution unit is not.

  • GOVT.13f

    Partially covered
    explaining how competition and free enterprise influence the local, national, and global economies

    Covered by

    • · Ep 1 · Price Shocks and Why You Keep Buying
    • · Ep 4 · From Luxury to the Cheapest Calorie
    • · Ep 1 · Follow the Money: Bean to Cup
    • · Ep 2 · Who Gets Paid, Tea and Coffee Compared
    • · Ep 3 · The Commodity Trap
    • · Ep 12 · The Jimador's Share
    • · Ep 14 · Pattern 3: Labor Captures the Smallest Share (the smile curve)
    • · Ep 21 · The Smile Curve, Confirmed

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: competition and value capture along real commodity chains are taught (the smile curve, who gets paid); a general free-enterprise treatment is not.

  • GOVT.14a

    Partially covered
    explaining government’s limited but important role in free enterprise and how that affects individual economic freedoms

    Covered by

    • · Ep 4 · The Hidden Costs of Cheap Sugar

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: government's role in a market is taught through the U.S. sugar program (quotas, price supports, tariffs); the effect on individual economic freedoms is implied, not worked.

  • GOVT.14c

    Partially covered
    evaluating government’s establishment and maintenance of the rules and institutions in which markets operate, including the establishment and enforcement of property rights, contracts, consumer rights, labor-management relations, environmental protection, and competition in the marketplace

    Covered by

    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 9 · 1935: the year organizing became a right (the Wagner Act)
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 10 · The hole in the law: who the Wagner Act left out
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 4 · Two ideas about who a union is for: the Knights and the AFL
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 5 · Haymarket, 1886
    • · The History of Unions, Lesson 6 · Homestead, Pullman, and the weapon that actually broke strikes
    • · Ep 4 · The Hidden Costs of Cheap Sugar

    What we do and don't cover: Partial: labor-management relations (the Wagner Act's regime and who it excluded, the Gilded-Age fight that led there) and market rules (the sugar program) are worked; property rights, contracts, consumer rights, and environmental protection are not.

  • GOVT.14g

    Partially covered
    evaluating the trade-offs in government decisions

    Covered by

    • · Ep 4 · The Hidden Costs of Cheap Sugar
    • · 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: trade-offs in government decisions are taught through the sugar program (intended stable prices, unintended ~$3.5bn/yr consumer cost) and the War on Drugs (the balloon effect); not as a general decision-analysis method.

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 Virginia mathematics standard.
  • Virginia's English and Science SOL — deferred, not denied. Virginia writes its own English SOL and its own Science SOL (Virginia is NOT an NGSS state). Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite: the Virginia DOE's standards portal refused our tooling this pass, so these courses carry no Virginia claims yet. The BVC rhetoric, media-literacy, and research-project work that maps to them elsewhere is real; it is the Virginia text we have not yet retrieved from an acceptable source. (The GOVT Skills strand does give our source-evaluation and argument work a genuine home — Skills GOVT c and j above.)
  • The civic-identity, comparative-systems, and money-in-politics objectives we do not teach. GOVT.2b-f and GOVT.4a-d (comparing forms of government; Tocqueville's five values; the mottos 'E Pluribus Unum' and 'In God We Trust'; the American Creed) ask for civic-identity content the catalog does not teach. GOVT.3a (The Federalist Papers #10 and #51), GOVT.1d (George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom, Madison's role in the Bill of Rights), GOVT.6a-b/6f (suffrage expansion, campaign finance, gerrymandering), GOVT.9d (originalism vs. judicial activism), GOVT.10e (partisan vs. nonpartisan offices), GOVT.13b/13d (Smith/Marx/Keynes/Hayek/Friedman/Sowell; the Bill of Rights vs. the Communist Manifesto), and GOVT.14b/14d-f (public goods, taxation, fiscal and monetary policy) are named but not genuinely taught, so we do not claim them.
  • GOVT.3g (the amendment process) — a real match we cannot cite as printed. GOVT.3g, 'explaining the amendment process', is a genuine match — the catalog teaches both Article V and Virginia's two-sessions-plus-a-referendum path. But the printed clause is under the ~40-character floor the isolation suite enforces to reject paraphrases, and we will not pad it. Virginia's amendment path is instead cited where it has longer standard text to attach to (GOVT.10b, GOVT.1c). The gap is in the citeable grain, not the lesson.

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.

Browse the coursesPick a different state