Illinois standards alignment

• 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

  • Living on the Water
  • What the River Carries
  • Cairo: Where Two Rivers Meet
  • Sold Down the River
  • The Delta, and the Way North
  • The Ohio, and the Line
  • The Wabash, and What a Watershed Is
  • The Engineered River: Locks, Dams and Barges
  • What an Expedition Is
  • How to Research: Finding Out Whether It's True
  • The Green Book: How to Read a Route
  • Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It
  • The Gym and the Color Line
  • Two Racetracks
  • Mudsock: How a Rivalry Marks a Boundary
  • The President's House
  • Fort Harrison: The Federal Footprint
  • Washington, DC: Where the Instrument Was Blessed
  • Philadelphia: The University and the Block
  • Seattle: The Modern Bookend
  • Baltimore: The Whole Chain
  • Pittsburgh: Where the Playbook Was Written
  • How the Tools Traveled
  • Exported: How Others Studied American Race Law
  • What They Built: Black Business Districts
  • The Negro Leagues: Who Owned the Game
  • Afrocentricity: How to Evaluate a Contested Paradigm
  • Training the Colonizer: The Knowledge That Was Taken
  • Africa Before Colonization: The Documented Record
  • Asia Before European Colonization: The Center of Gravity
  • Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: Cities, Calendars, and the People Who Are Still Here
  • Pan-Africanism: The Idea, the Movement, the Reckoning
  • The Moors: The Word, the History, and the Evidence
  • Who Gets the Credit: Black Inventors and the Machinery of Attribution
  • Who Gets Named
  • Who Signs the Print
  • The Name on the Door
  • Written by Himself
  • The Match
  • Who Has the Power to Do This?
  • The Local Layer
  • The Middle Layer: States, Provinces, and Regions
  • Forms of Government, Honestly
  • How Countries Constitute Themselves
  • Tribal Nations and Indigenous Governance
  • Governments Without States
  • How Power Changes Hands
  • Capstone: Map Your Own Stack
  • She Took the Seat and Held the Door
  • How the NAACP Learned to Win
  • The Editor of The Crisis
  • Shirley Graham Wrote the Opera First
  • Monsters at the Edge of the Map
  • Giants, Dragons, and the Bones They Came From
  • Wrong for Good Reasons

  • · 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
  • · 1 · A tooth in a Beijing apothecary
  • · 9 · The whale that is an island
  • · 10 · How they wrote it: the eyewitness who was not there
  • · 1 · The phrase that is on almost no map
  • · 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 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. Monsters at the Edge of the Map adds the corroboration half directly: it teaches that repeated claims count only when their sources are independent, and drills tracing a claim back to its earliest form.

• 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

  • BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution
  • What the River Carries
  • Sold Down the River
  • The Delta, and the Way North
  • The Ohio, and the Line
  • What an Expedition Is
  • How to Research: Finding Out Whether It's True
  • The Green Book: How to Read a Route
  • Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It
  • The Gym and the Color Line
  • Two Racetracks
  • Mudsock: How a Rivalry Marks a Boundary
  • The President's House
  • Fort Harrison: The Federal Footprint
  • Washington, DC: Where the Instrument Was Blessed
  • Philadelphia: The University and the Block
  • Seattle: The Modern Bookend
  • Baltimore: The Whole Chain
  • Pittsburgh: Where the Playbook Was Written
  • How the Tools Traveled
  • Exported: How Others Studied American Race Law
  • The Schoolhouse Network
  • Where We Rested
  • What They Built: Black Business Districts
  • The Negro Leagues: Who Owned the Game
  • Brazil: State-Chartered Unions, a Union-Made President, and the 2017 Rupture
  • Chile: A Labor System Designed to Be Weak
  • Germany: Workers on the Board
  • India: When Most Workers Have No Employer
  • South Africa: The Union That Helped End Apartheid, Then Joined the Government
  • South Korea: Democracy, the Chaebol, and the Lawsuit as a Weapon
  • Sweden & Denmark: The Wage Floor That Isn't a Law
  • Africa Before Colonization: The Documented Record
  • Asia Before European Colonization: The Center of Gravity
  • Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: Cities, Calendars, and the People Who Are Still Here
  • Pan-Africanism: The Idea, the Movement, the Reckoning
  • Afrocentricity: How to Evaluate a Contested Paradigm
  • Training the Colonizer: The Knowledge That Was Taken
  • The Moors: The Word, the History, and the Evidence
  • Who Gets the Credit: Black Inventors and the Machinery of Attribution
  • Who Gets Named
  • Who Signs the Print
  • The Name on the Door
  • Written by Himself
  • The Match
  • The Great Migration: How Six Million People Remade America (and the World)
  • Clean: A Global History of Bathing and Soap
  • District of Columbia Civics: How Your Government Works
  • Who Has the Power to Do This?
  • What a Business Entity Actually Is
  • The Local Layer
  • Financing Without Access
  • The US Forms: Sole Prop to Corporation
  • The Middle Layer: States, Provinces, and Regions
  • Forms of Government, Honestly
  • How Countries Constitute Themselves
  • Cooperatives
  • How Other Countries Form Businesses
  • Tribal Nations and Indigenous Governance
  • Governments Without States
  • How Power Changes Hands
  • Governance: Who Actually Decides
  • Capstone: Map Your Own Stack
  • Capstone: Choose a Form and Defend It
  • She Took the Seat and Held the Door
  • How the NAACP Learned to Win
  • The Editor of The Crisis
  • Shirley Graham Wrote the Opera First
  • Deep Time and the Dinosaur Renaissance

  • · 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.