BALDWIN, New York – On a fall morning weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Jayla Rennocks and her tablemates were debating whether a social media post with a picture of Donald Trump and the words “I’m voting Aderholt for Congress” was propaganda, publicity or news.
The task for this high school social studies class was recognizing whether this kind of information was trying to persuade them to vote for a candidate, get them to buy a product or inform them about a news event, their teacher, Tayla Plotke, said.
This campaign ad is “trying to get you guys to do something,” she told the class.
It’s important to Plotke, a seven-year veteran of the district and a history and technology junkie, that students learn to decipher whether the information they consume online is factual or it has ulterior motives. She’s among a generation of educators teaching kids to examine the news sources they rely on and giving them tools to determine which information to trust.
More K-12 schools nationwide are teaching news literacy to young people. This year they may be addressing the exponential rise in disinformation online related to the 2024 presidential election, the Israel-Hamas war or other topics critical to voters and democracy.
The Baldwin School District is among hundreds nationwide that require young people to learn news literacy skills before they graduate from high school. Those skills include recognizing biases in news reports, spotting differences between news articles and advertisements and identifying disinformation created by artificial intelligence.
In interviews with USA TODAY, district leaders, educators, students, news literacy advocates said the ability to discern between factual news and disinformation is necessary for youth. In recent years, lawmakers in a few states voted to make the course a graduation requirement.
There has also been plenty of pushback from people concerned about the political content and overall merit of a required news literacy course, said Chuck Salter, CEO of The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides news literacy resources to educators. Others worry it will be a burden to adopt this curriculum in addition to the other mandated material districts are required to teach.
The Baldwin Union Free School District in Long Island has required high schoolers to learn news literacy since the 2018-2019 school year. Shari Camhi, the district’s superintendent, has found it worthwhile for the youngest generation of information and news consumers.
“All you have to do is tune into any social media platform. … Even really being able to know who the writer is is something you have to fact-check,” she said. “In my day and age, we went to the World Book Encyclopedias” she said, noting that, unlike the encyclopedia, online content kids rely on hasn’t been “fact-checked and triple-checked.”
‘The school system must respond urgently’
Stony Brook University’s Howard Schneider, who teaches news literacy to college students, helped train educators at Baldwin High School.
When Schneider started teaching college students what it meant to be news literate in the 2006-2007 school year, the U.S. was “on the cusp of a social media revolution,” he said. Between George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s presidential terms, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were the emerging sources of information, he said.
“We were on the frontlines and we were seeing the impact of what was coming,” Schneider said. “But the rest of the country hadn’t caught up with the concern.”
With the onslaught of disinformation and the growth of artificial intelligence-generated online content, schools have a responsibility to “respond urgently,” he said.
“We’re in the mix of the most profound communication revolution in 500 years – since Gutenberg,” he said referring to Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. “This is like putting 10-year-olds behind a car without a license.”
One lesson in his news literacy course involves what he calls lateral reading. It “means students often have to leave the text” and look for another source to verify whether what they’re consuming is fact or fiction, he said.
“Students can no longer read the same way when they’re watching a video, on social media or reading a text,” Schneider said.
Schneider referenced a 2022 study from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education that found that nearly 500 students at six high schools given six 50-minute lessons on lateral reading skills were likelier to “judge the credibility of digital content” than those who hadn’t been taught the same skills.
Where are kids learning how to dispel misinformation?
Three states – Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey – require schools to teach kids news literacy.
California, Colorado, Delaware, Ohio, Texas and Delaware have passed bills requiring states to adopt news literacy standards, but the laws don’t explicitly require teaching the skills, according to a state tracker from the News Literacy Project.
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In other states, the availability of news literacy classes varies district-to-district and school-to-school, said Salter from the News Literacy Project, and in some places, it’s not taught at all.
The curriculum is often taught by impassioned teachers or led by district leaders, Salter said.
Erik Van Houten, an assistant principal and high school history teacher in Las Vegas, and Erin Wilder, a high school teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, are teaching news literacy using the organization’s resources.
Van Houten applied for a grant after he noticed people in his senior class were sharing false information about the Israel-Hamas war online. His school was chosen to receive the resources.
Last year, Van Houten gathered the history teachers at his school to develop a plan to teach students about the larger Israel-Palestine conflict and help them decipher inaccurate news about the Israel-Hamas war.
“From the beginning to the end of class, I saw a much better understanding of what was going on,” he said. “And middle school teachers said they were having more meaningful conversations with students about the conflict.”
This year, his students are focused on interpreting information related to the 2024 presidential election.
For Van Houten, it’s important that students know how to dispel election-related disinformation and differentiate it from campaign ads and news articles, especially because some students in his class will be first-time voters and they live in a swing state. He wants them to have the correct information before they cast their votes.
In Georgia, Wilder recently taught a lesson about the importance of lateral reading.
She shared an article with them about the workers’ strike against Boeing and told students to approach it as critical thinkers.
Her direction: Question the credibility of the article, look for potential bias in sources and look for other articles before you make a final decision about the topic. She teaches her kids that no source or agency is “inherently right or wrong” but comparing multiple sources and articles gives them a “complete view of different issues.”
At the end of the semester, Plotke, in Long Island, will require the teens in her class to fact-check news articles produced by artificial intelligence so kids “don’t fall for disinformation” in this era of mass AI-generated content.
“It’s inevitable, it’s there, it pops up on Google AI. The kids are using it,” she said.
‘Provides students with knowledge’
The News Literacy Project wants more states to pass laws that would make it a requirement for kids to learn news literacy curriculum, Salter said.
The nonprofit’s next partner is the Los Angeles Unified School District, LAUSD, the second largest district in the U.S. Los Angeles educators are learning methods to teach students how to dispel misinformation. The district plans to integrate media literacy into elementary and secondary schools, Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for LAUSD, said in an email to USA TODAY.
“This resource supports the development of critical thinking skills and provides students with the knowledge and tools to help determine the credibility of a source and separate fact from fiction,” Haber wrote.
Schneider, from Stony Brook University, said elementary school educators are now teaching kids how to decipher misinformation and, in at least one Long Island district, the news literacy content is being translated into Spanish for Spanish-speaking students.
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‘Believing everything that they see‘
Back in Long Island, the lessons have already helped Rennocks, 18, and her classmates learn to question whether the information they’re consuming online comes from credible sources.
Sitting at a table with four peers, Rennocks said she doesn’t trust news outlets as a source of unbiased political information. The others chimed in that they agreed.
They said they’re more likely to trust television debates. They prefer to hear candidates speak for themselves because they’re not sure they can trust the influx of information on social media.
Rennocks said she recently saw a post on X from Cardi B in which the rapper criticized something Donald Trump said, and she immediately went to Google to check other sources to verify it. The skills she’s learned in class led her to trust her skepticism.
After checking with other sources, Rennocks said she was shocked to learn that what Cardi B stated was accurate.
Trump did, in fact, say: “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. … You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again” to a group of conservative Christians in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Rennocks didn’t believe the former president had really said that.
“That’s what made me look it up,” she said. “Because I was like, ‘What did he just say?'”
A few other students said they saw the same video and went to look for another source. They said they don’t trust many traditional media outlets to be unbiased, so they check a few places to see what’s right.
But Rennocks isn’t confident other people her age – outside of her social studies class – would do the same thing.
Many rely on one news source, what their favorite celebrities or influencers say on social media or use AI to get their information, she said.
“Our generation is really fixated on social media and believing everything that they see,” she said.
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.