Illinois standards alignment

• 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
  • · 2 · Three objects that look alike and are not
  • · 7 · Decoration, warning, advertisement
  • · 13 · How Africa's map emptied out
  • · 4 · The griffin argument, held open
  • · 3 · The cyclops and the dwarf elephant
  • · 5 · How they wrote it: what "may have inspired" is doing
  • · 8 · Geocentrism was good science
  • · 11 · Wegener was right, and he was dismissed
  • · 13 · They laughed at Galileo
  • · 4 · Where the flat-earth story came from

  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. Monsters at the Edge of the Map runs the same assessment on documents rather than testimony: three contemporary map genres set against each other, then the reasons (cost, buyer, argument, inheritance) an element appears at all.

• 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

  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

  • · Ep 4 · Blood-Sweetened Luxury
  • · Ep 15 · Torches of Freedom
  • · Ep 17 · Lin Zexu's Letter
  • · Ep 16 · Three Sentences, Three Policies
  • · 1 · Five genres, one discovery
  • · 4 · The paper: hedges, consistent with, and what a scientist will not say
  • · 5 · The press release: the institution's voice
  • · 6 · The headline: where suggests becomes proves

• 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

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection

  • · 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
  • · 16 · Assignment: read one map's margin
  • · 15 · Assignment: one discovery, three genres, with sources
  • · 16 · Assignment: trace a headline back to the paper
  • · 11 · Citation as a genre convention with a job

  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

  • 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
  • · 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
  • · 16 · Assignment: read one map's margin
  • · 15 · Assignment: one discovery, three genres, with sources
  • · 16 · Assignment: trace a headline back to the paper
  • · 11 · Citation as a genre convention with a job

  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

  • 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
  • · 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
  • · 12 · Brontosaurus: the animal that was, was not, and may be again
  • · 15 · Bakker, warm blood, and an argument that was won in parts
  • · 18 · Chicxulub: what confirmed it, and what is still argued
  • · 19 · Claim and evidence, across two hundred years

  What we do and don't cover: Full in the BVC Nathan Green lesson, where the documentary and oral records openly disagree, and full in Deep Time and the Dinosaur Renaissance, which makes discrepancy the organising exercise: Tschopp et al. 2015 taught as a proposal with later analyses on both sides, two disagreeing 2019 papers on Deccan tempo, and a 41-author review paired with the formal published comments disputing it. 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.

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 Illinois Common Core (Illinois Learning Standards) mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Illinois adopted the NGSS verbatim (January 2014) as its science standards, so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. There is no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• Financial Literacy — one rejection, two editions of codes, and the whole history in order. Until 2026-08-28 this entry said Illinois's Economics strand carried a six-standard Financial Literacy sub-strand and that the catalog claimed none of SS.EC.FL.1-6. Two things were wrong with that by then. First, the catalog now teaches one personal-finance course, MONEY-01, on how a consumer credit decision is made. Second, and more seriously, SS.EC.FL.1-6 are the codes of the 2017 printing; ISBE's current document, adopted for implementation in 2022-2023, renumbered the strand to SS.9-12.EC.FL, extended it from six standards to nine, rewrote the text of every one, and prints FL.6 as "No standard." Two of the nine are claimed above, SS.9-12.EC.FL.9 and SS.9-12.EC.FL.4, both as partials with their gaps named. FL.9's mortgage-lending clause, which the credit course could not reach and which this entry previously deferred to a course that did not yet exist, was filled on 2026-08-28 when MONEY-06 (`housing-decisions`) shipped; the standard stays partial because its economic-indicators half is still not taught. The other seven are not claimed. FL.3 is time, interest rates and inflation over a saving lifetime, and FL.5 is diversified investment risk and return; both are outside this catalog. FL.1 (costs and benefits subject to factors outside one's control) and FL.7 (cognitive biases, environmental influences and access to resources in financial decision-making) each contain a clause the course genuinely teaches, the structural constraint on access, but each also asks for a decision-making method the course does not deliver, so they are left unclaimed rather than stretched to a thin partial. FL.2 is information-gathering, planning and budgeting; the course teaches the first and refuses the other two, since it gives no financial advice. FL.8 is risk disposition and opportunity recognition, which the course does not teach at all. FL.6 has no standard to claim. ONE OPEN QUESTION, FILED RATHER THAN GUESSED: only the FL strand was re-fetched this pass, so the SS.CV, SS.EC, SS.G, SS.H and SS.IS codes elsewhere in this file still cite the 2017 document and may have moved in the same revision. That is recorded as a research check rather than assumed either way. MERGED 2026-08-29, AND THIS IS THE PART A TEACHER SHOULD READ. Until then a SECOND Financial Literacy rejection sat beside this one and contradicted it. That entry said Illinois's strand has six standards, that SS.EC.FL.6 is insurance, and that SS.EC.FL.2 and SS.EC.FL.4 are claimed. Under the edition ISBE currently publishes none of those three statements holds: the strand has nine standards, FL.6 is printed "No standard.", and the two claims made against the current numbering are FL.9 and FL.4, not FL.2 and FL.4. Its substance is folded in here instead of being deleted, because the thing it described is real and is still in this file. The Economics framework above carries entries coded SS.EC.FL.2.9-12 and SS.EC.FL.4.9-12, added on 2026-08-28 when MONEY-02 shipped, and those are 2017 codes, consistent with the rest of that framework and inconsistent with this one. Concretely: FL.2 at 2017 numbering (informed financial decisions by collecting information, planning and budgeting) is claimed as a partial on its collecting-information half alone, and FL.4 at 2017 numbering (the costs and benefits of payment options) is claimed as a partial on its payment half, with credit, lenders and interest expressly left to MONEY-01. The four the old entry named as unclaimed at 2017 numbering, and which stay unclaimed, are FL.1 (strategies to increase income), FL.3 (time, interest rates and inflation on saving), FL.5 (diversified investment risk and return) and FL.6 (the costs and benefits of insurance). SO ILLINOIS CURRENTLY SHOWS THE SAME TEACHING TWICE, UNDER TWO EDITIONS OF THE SAME STRAND, and that is not a state of affairs to leave standing: it belongs to the same open question as the rest of the SS.EC codes, and it is deliberately NOT patched here, because moving those two entries means re-reading the whole 2017-cited half of this file against the current document rather than editing two lines. The research check is the place that job is tracked.
• The Illinois Civics flagship's Illinois-specific structure has no Illinois code to cite. Illinois Civics teaches the 1970 Constitution, the plural executive (uniquely both a Comptroller and a Treasurer), the partisan-elected Supreme Court, the uniquely narrow Legislative-Article initiative and the 1980 Cutback Amendment, and one of the nation's strongest home-rule traditions — from Illinois's own official sources. But the 2017 Social Science Standards are DISCIPLINARY CONCEPTS: no standard names a state's structure, so these lessons map only onto the abstract institution and participation standards (SS.CV.1, SS.CV.2, SS.CV.3). The gap is in the standards, not the course.
• Civics standards we checked and rejected. SS.CV.5 (civic dispositions and diverse perspectives as a named concept) and SS.CV.6 (political parties, the media, and public interest groups — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis) are not genuinely taught, so we do not claim them.
• The disciplinary standards we read and did not claim. Across History, Economics, and Geography we claim only the concept standards the catalog genuinely teaches. SS.H.2/4/5/6/11/12, SS.EC.2-4/6-8, and SS.G.1-5/7/9/10 were checked and not claimed — the change-and-continuity, market-mechanics, macroeconomic-indicator, mapping-tool, and culture standards are not this catalog's subject. The reject list is the evidence the map was not padded.