Montana standards alignment

• Economics, Grades 9-12 — (2)(f)

  Covered

  evaluate benefits, costs, and possible outcomes of government policies to influence market outcomes

  Covered by

  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

  • · Ep 4 · The Hidden Costs of Cheap Sugar
  • · Ep 8 · Prohibition, the Experiment That Failed
  • · Ep 8 · Selling Prohibition (the rhetoric that drove the movement)
  • · 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

  Note: Government policies that shape markets are evaluated for benefits, costs, and outcomes in real depth: the U.S. sugar program's quotas and tariffs (stable prices vs. a multi-billion-dollar consumer cost), Prohibition, and the War on Drugs and its balloon effect.

• Geography, Grades 9-12 — (3)(b)

  Covered

  use geographic data to analyze variations in the spatial patterns of cultural and environmental characteristics at multiple scales

  Covered by

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • Tea — The Way of Tea
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
  • Kava — The Root of Peace

  • · 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
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option A, map the supply chain of 3 items from your morning routine
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, Coffee Belt climate report, with maps and data tables

  Note: The Commodity Map is this standard: every episode pinned at its origin, the Growing Belts analyzed by latitude band and country, and the Coffee project has the student prepare maps and data tables of spatial patterns at multiple scales.

• History, Grades 9-12 — (4)(h)

  Covered

  analyze the ways in which the perspectives of those writing history shaped the history they produced

  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
  • · Ep 4 · Whose Voice Tells the Story

  Note: This is the Whose Voice method: a planter's euphemism and passive voice read against two first-person accounts by formerly enslaved writers, and reading a text for what its author leaves out — perspective shaping the record, taught directly.

• History, Grades 9-12 — (4)(i)

  Covered

  evaluate how historiography is influenced by perspective and available historical sources

  Covered by

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

  • · Ep 10 · The Oral History That Survived (recovering Nathan “Nearest” Green's erased role)
  • · 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 Nathan Green lesson is historiography by name: the documentary record and the oral record disagree, and the episode teaches why oral history is a legitimate scholarly method for resolving that — perspective and available sources shaping the history produced.

• Economics, Grades 9-12 — (2)(c)

  Partially covered

  analyze the ways in which pressures and incentives influence what is produced and distributed in a market system

  Covered by

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • Tea — The Way of Tea
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
  • Kava — The Root of Peace

  • · 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 gets produced and distributed is taught through real commodity markets — climate and soil deciding where crops can grow, supply shocks and inelastic demand moving prices — rather than as a general markets unit.

• Economics, Grades 9-12 — (2)(d)

  Partially covered

  evaluate the extent to which competition among producers, among consumers, and among laborers exists in specific markets

  Covered by

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • Tea — The Way of Tea
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • My Daily Altar — Season Synthesis

  • · 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

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: competition in specific markets is evaluated along real commodity chains — who captures value, why producers stay poor in the commodity trap — but not as a systematic market-structure unit across producers, consumers, and laborers.

• Geography, Grades 9-12 — (3)(d)

  Partially covered

  analyze relationships and interactions within and between human and physical systems to explain reciprocal influences that occur among them, including American Indians

  Covered by

  • Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Kava — The Root of Peace
  • Tea — The Way of Tea
  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom

  • · 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
  • · 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

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: reciprocal human-physical interaction is the curriculum's method — volcanic soil and altitude deciding what grows, climate change redrawing the growing belts. The standard's American Indian focus is not taught.

• Geography, Grades 9-12 — (3)(g)

  Partially covered

  evaluate the influence of long-term climate variability on human migration and settlement patterns, resource use, and land uses at local-to-global scales

  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 · Islands Under Pressure
  • · Ep 8 · Beer Geography Is Shifting

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: published climate forecasts and their implications for growers, land use, and production regions are analyzed in depth (coffee, cacao, kava, beer). Climate-driven human migration is touched, not worked.

• History, Grades 9-12 — (4)(b)

  Partially covered

  analyze change and continuity in historical eras in US and world history

  Covered by

  • Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom
  • My Daily Altar — Season Synthesis

  • · 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
  • · 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
  • · Mexico, Lesson 7 · Mexico rewrites its labor law, and the 68-year gap that explains why
  • · Mexico, Lesson 10 · The Rapid Response Mechanism: an international labor rule with teeth
  • · Mexico, Lesson 12 · The limits, honestly: the cases the United States lost
  • · 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)

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: change and continuity is traced for the arc of American labor (the Gilded Age through the Wagner Act to NAFTA/USMCA) and for how colonial cash-crop systems persist into the present — genuine, though not a general survey of eras.

• History, Grades 9-12 — (4)(c)

  Partially covered

  identify ways in which people and groups exercise agency in difficult historical, contemporary, and tribal contexts

  Covered by

  • Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

  • · Ep 4 · The Triangular Trade and the Middle Passage
  • · Ep 4 · Resistance and Revolution
  • · Ep 11 · The Maroons
  • · Ep 11 · The Haitian Revolution
  • · The History of Unions, Lesson 16 · The colour bar: unions' own history of exclusion
  • · The History of Unions, Lesson 17 · Randolph to Memphis: the labor half of the civil-rights movement
  • · The Great Migration, Lesson 6 · The Black press as engine: the Chicago Defender
  • · The Great Migration, Lesson 7 · The Harlem Renaissance & the New Negro

  What we do and don't cover: Partial: agency in difficult contexts is taught as the curriculum's throughline — the Maroons and plantation resistance, Randolph to Memphis, the Black press as an engine of change. The standard's tribal contexts are not taught.

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:

• Indian Education for All — Montana's constitutional mandate, which this catalog does not teach. Montana's 1972 Constitution (Article X, Section 1(2)) commits the state, in its educational goals, to “the preservation of [American Indians'] cultural integrity,” and the Indian Education for All Act (1999) carries that into every subject. It is woven through the standards we mapped: civics-and-government (1)(g) (“explain the foundations and complexity of sovereignty for federally recognized tribes in Montana”), the “including American Indians / American Indian history / tribal contexts” clauses in economics (2)(a), geography (3)(d), and history (4)(c), (4)(d), (4)(e), and (4)(j), the American Indian author/source requirements added to the ELA literacy standards, and a science standard on American Indian tribes' management of natural resources. Montana Civics teaches Montana's OWN state government, and the BVC catalog teaches world, U.S., colonial, and labor history — but neither teaches tribal governments, tribal sovereignty, or American Indian history. So every tribal/American-Indian-specific standard and standard-clause is NOT claimed, and the IEFA-modified literacy standards we do claim are marked partial with the American Indian requirement called out. The gap is in the catalog, not the standards.
• Mathematics — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Montana mathematics standard.
• Montana's own state government has thin coverage in the 9-12 standards. Montana Civics teaches the 1972 Constitution (environment, privacy, right to know), the biennial 90-day citizen Legislature, the plural executive, the nonpartisan elected judiciary, the initiative and referendum, and the 56 counties — from Montana's own sources. But the grades 9-12 civics-and-government standards are federal, comparative, and tribal in emphasis; they contain no “describe your state's government structure” expectation at high school, so the flagship's Montana-structure lessons map only where (1)(e), (1)(i), and (1)(j) reach. The depth is in the course, not the standards.
• Civics-and-government expectations we checked and rejected. Beyond the tribal-sovereignty standard (1)(g), we do not claim (1)(b) (constitutions, laws, treaties, and international agreements on relationships), (1)(c) (international agreements on world issues), (1)(d) (applying civic virtues when working with others, a disposition), (1)(f) (comparing the U.S. system to international systems), (1)(h) (deliberative processes), (1)(k) (market, media, and group influences on civic virtues — our media literacy is consumer protection, not political-media analysis), or (1)(l) (ensuring civil rights across levels) — the courses do not genuinely teach these.
• Economics, geography, and history expectations we checked and rejected. Economics (2)(a) (IEFA), (2)(b), (2)(e), (2)(g)-(2)(i) (economic cycles, indicators, and monetary and fiscal policy) are not taught — the BVC economics is microeconomic and trade-focused. Geography (3)(a), (3)(c), (3)(e), (3)(f), and (3)(h) are not the worked material. History (4)(a), (4)(e) (IEFA), (4)(f), (4)(g), (4)(j) (IEFA), (4)(l), (4)(m), and (4)(n) (a sustained source-based argument-writing programme) are not genuinely taught; the Coffee project reaches (4)(m)/(4)(n) only as one optional project.
• Science — two partial claims, no more. Montana's 2016 science standards are Montana's own, not the NGSS, and this catalog has no laboratory work, no investigation, and no modelling — so we claim exactly two Earth-and-Space-Science standards, partially, and explain the limit on each. The IEFA science standard (American Indian tribes' management of natural resources) is not taught.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Montana's closest frameworks (Computer Science, World Languages) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Montana claims this pass.