Washington, D.C. standards alignment

• WH2.13

  Partially covered

  Analyze government structures, technological innovations and geographical features of empires and city states across the Americas to evaluate the drastic impact of European colonization on Indigenous societies, including the Aztec and Incan Empires.

  Covered by

  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods

  • · Ep 3 · Food of the Gods (cacao as Maya/Aztec currency and sacrament)
  • · Ep 3 · Conquest and the Great Reversal
  • · Ep 12 · The Sacred Plant (Aztec governance of pulque)
  • · Ep 12 · Burning the Books

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: Mesoamerica (Maya and Aztec) is covered in real depth, through the plants those societies governed. The Incan Empire is not covered, and the standard names it explicitly.

• 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

  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom

  • · 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.

• 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

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Kava — The Root of Peace

  • · 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 curriculum does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — almost nothing. There is no laboratory work, no investigation and no scientific modelling here. We claim a single NGSS performance expectation, partially, and we explain exactly why on the entry itself. It is not a science course and we will not sell it as one.
• Prohibition and mass incarceration. The curriculum teaches both. D.C.'s 2023 social studies standards contain no standard on either (we searched the full document), so there is nothing for us to cite. The gap is in the standards, not the lessons.
• D.C.'s economics and geography strands. In the 2023 document these are un-numbered “statements of practice”, not coded standards. There is no code to cite, so we cite none — even though the economics content lines up well.
• The wider catalog — not yet mapped for D.C. The civics, U.S. history, health, and PE mapping done for Indiana has not been repeated against D.C.'s frameworks yet. D.C. currently carries the Commodity Map alignment only; the catalog-wide pass is queued.