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Better Vice Club

Washington standards alignment

Designed for high school. Below is every Washingtonstandard 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.

18
standards mapped
7
fully covered
11
partially covered
5
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'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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Washington · Social Studies

Washington State K-12 Learning Standards for Social Studies — Economics, Grades 9-12

Adopted September 2019 · Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) · retrieved 2026-07-18

Washington's high-school Economics standards. This is the honest home for much of the Commodity Map's specialization, trade-policy, comparative-advantage, and globalization content.

Read the source document →

Washington · Social Studies

Washington State K-12 Learning Standards for Social Studies — Geography, Grades 9-12

Adopted September 2019 · Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) · retrieved 2026-07-18

Washington's high-school Geography standards — the honest home for the Commodity Map's resource-distribution, climate, and expansion-and-encounter content, and for the Great Migration.

Read the source document →

Washington · Social Studies

Washington State K-12 Learning Standards for Social Studies — History, Grades 9-12

Adopted September 2019 · Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) · retrieved 2026-07-18

Washington's high-school History standards. The H3 (multiple perspectives) strand is a strong social-studies home for the catalog's source-evaluation and Whose Voice method, alongside the verbatim Common Core RH literacy strand adopted above.

Read the source document →

  • H3.11-12.4

    Covered
    Integrate evidence from multiple relevant historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument about the past to create claims and counterclaims.

    Covered by

    • · 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
    • · Ep 10 · The Oral History That Survived (recovering Nathan “Nearest” Green's erased role)

    Note: Integrating primary and secondary sources into a reasoned argument, noting where they disagree, is exactly the Whose Voice and Nathan Green method: a planter's account set against formerly enslaved writers', and the documentary record set against the oral record.

  • H3.11-12.2

    Covered
    Analyze the ways in which the perspectives of those writing history shaped the history that they produced.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story
    • · 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: Whose voice is present in the record, and whose is absent, is taught directly — how the position of the person writing shapes the account that survives.

  • H2.9-10.1

    Partially covered
    Analyze how individuals and movements have shaped world history (1450-present).

    Covered by

    • · Ep 2 · Who Grows the Tea (colonial and plantation labour)
    • · Ep 5 · Whose Knowledge Is It
    • · Ep 6 · Kava Governs
    • · Ep 17 · The Opium Wars
    • · Ep 20 · The Ban Against the Evidence
    • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
    • · Ep 4 · Resistance and Revolution
    • · Ep 11 · The Maroons
    • · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution
    • · 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: movements that shaped the modern world are taught through the commodities they turned on — imperial and colonial systems and the resistance to them (Maroon communities, revolution, abolition), and Solidarność at the Cold War's end. It is a set of deep threads, not a survey of the period.

  • H4.11-12.3

    Partially covered
    Analyze how current events today are rooted in past events.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 3 · Conquest and the Great Reversal
    • · Ep 5 · How Coca-Cola Got Its Name (biopiracy)
    • · Ep 7 · The Same Story, Six Times
    • · Ep 11 · The Debt of Freedom (the 1825 French indemnity and Haiti's modern poverty)
    • · 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: how the present is rooted in the past is taught where the courses reach it — how colonial trade patterns persist today, and how the War on Drugs' foreign arm grew from earlier policy. It is not a general treatment of contemporary issues.

Washington · English/Language Arts

Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy

Grades 11-12 · Common Core State Standards Initiative · retrieved 2026-07-13

Washington formally adopted the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (and mathematics) in July 2011 (State Superintendent Randy Dorn). Washington distributes them as the Washington State K-12 Learning Standards for English Language Arts but retains the Common Core codes and text, so the literacy-in-history/social-studies (RH) and writing-in-history (WHST) strands this catalog touches are adopted verbatim. Note: OSPI is running a Learning Standards Review with a draft “WA ELA 2026” in progress; as of this writing the 2011 Common Core adoption remains the operative standard — confirm current status at ospi.k12.wa.us. We claim no mathematics standards.

Read the source document →

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.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

    • · 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.

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.8

    Covered
    Evaluate 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.

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.6

    Covered
    Determine 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

    • · Ep 4 · Blood-Sweetened Luxury
    • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
    • · Ep 17 · Lin Zexu's Letter
    • · Ep 16 · Three Sentences, Three Policies

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.WHST.11-12.7

    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

    • · 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.

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.WHST.11-12.8

    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

    • · 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.

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.9

    Partially 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

    • · 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.

Washington · Science

Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)

HS-ESS3 Earth and Human Activity · NGSS Lead States / nextgenscience.org · retrieved 2026-07-13

On October 1, 2013, Washington adopted the Next Generation Science Standards as the Washington State 2013 K-12 Science Learning Standards (WSSLS), the eighth state in the country to do so. The WSSLS are the NGSS, used with the NGSS codes verbatim (including HS-ESS3-1). This is not a science course, so we claim exactly one NGSS performance expectation, partially — see the note on it.

Read the source document →

  • HS-ESS3-1

    Partially covered
    Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the availability of natural resources, occurrence of natural hazards, and changes in climate have influenced human activity.

    Covered by

    • · Ep 1 · Climate Change Is Redrawing the Map
    • · Ep 3 · A Two-Degree Threat
    • · Ep 6 · Why Volcanic Soil Only
    • · Ep 10 · Karst Limestone and Bourbon
    • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, assess a producing country's climate viability and defend the assessment

    What we do and don't cover: Read this one carefully before you rely on it. This is NOT a science course, it has no laboratory work, no investigations and no scientific modelling. What it does have is precisely the content of HS-ESS3-1: resource availability and climate change shaping what humans do and where. The lessons supply the evidence; the STUDENT constructs the explanation only in the Coffee project (Option B). If your science requirement is assessed on the three-dimensional NGSS performance, this contributes to it, it does not discharge it.

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 Common Core mathematics standard Washington adopted.
  • Science — almost nothing. There is no laboratory work, no investigation and no scientific modelling here. Washington adopted the NGSS verbatim (as the WSSLS), 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.
  • Tribal governments and the Since Time Immemorial curriculum. Washington's social studies standards repeatedly reference tribal constitutions, tribal sovereignty, and the Since Time Immemorial curriculum (e.g., C2.11-12.2 names tribal constitutions; the standards footnote tribal connections throughout). The catalog does not teach tribal government, so we claim only the United-States and Washington-state portions of those standards and mark C2.11-12.2 partial for exactly this reason.
  • The flagship's election and tax specifics have no dedicated Washington code. Washington Civics teaches the all-mail (vote-by-mail) system and the top-two primary — the state's most distinctive civics content — plus the contested no-personal-income-tax tradition (the uniformity clause; the 2021 capital-gains tax upheld in 2023). Washington's high-school Civics standards contain no discrete election-administration or tax-policy standard, so this election content is taught but carries no Washington claim, and the tax content is reached only through the general C2 civics standards. The specifics have no code — the gap is in the standards, not the course.
  • Prohibition, the War on Drugs as domestic policy, and mass incarceration. The catalog teaches all three. Washington's 2019 social studies standards are analytical and thematic (“current events rooted in past events,” “individuals and movements”) rather than event-naming, so — unlike Washington, D.C. — there is no Washington standard that names Prohibition or mass incarceration to cite. We claim the War on Drugs' foreign-policy arm only through the broad H4.11-12.3, and mark it partial.
  • The wider catalog — health, PE, AI-literacy, and languages. Washington's relevant frameworks for these (Health and Physical Education; Computer Science; World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Washington claims this pass.

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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