Recommendations

We hope that our portal will help educators as they help their students develop these urgently needed skills. Yet changes in education policy (federal, state, and local) are also required to prompt educators to take advantage of resources like this, to ensure they receive the tools and training they need, and to align incentives so that they are rewarded for incorporating these new strategies in the classroom. Investments are also needed at the national and federal level to spur research and development, assess progress using newly created metrics and benchmarks, and build coalitions and networks across literacy, citizenship, and cybersecurity initiatives. (See Appendix for a diagram of emerging networks in this space.)

A networked array of actions, which must extend from research needs to professional development, should help to drive positive change by empowering the educator, and, in turn, the students, so that they can learn to participate meaningfully in 21st century civil society and resist the growing forces of online manipulation in all their forms.

At the highest level, three key elements of education strategy around these issues should include:

• Agenda-setting statements: We need attention and leadership at the most senior levels of government to stress how a healthy democracy and literally healthy population require us to face our information disorder with positive actions to build cyber citizenship skills. It is requisite for national leaders to communicate how domestic education and national security policy are now wrapped together in new ways. Such statements are essential to create support and validation for such programs.
• Coalition building: We should build on efforts to create a collaborative community of experts, practitioners, and organizations in fields ranging from national and cybersecurity to pedagogy and education policy, along with frontline educators. This coalition-building effort needs people and institutions who are responsible for coordinating multiple lines of activity and creating future fora for collaboration. In the civics arena, the Educating for American Democracy effort, which has brought together dozens of champion organizations across education and research initiatives, is a model.¹
• Catalyzing investment: We need investments in cyber citizenship skills from philanthropy and government that starts to come close to even a fraction of what is already spent on debating and researching platform company legal regulation and software changes. Catalyzing support is required for (a) research for what works best and how to deploy those ideas, (b) information and tool sharing across sectors, and (c) expanding the deployment of such programs that could have a magnified effect. This is also a space for incentivizing matching funds.

We offer these specific recommendations for those in federal, state, or philanthropic roles:

Federal Agencies

• The White House National Security and Domestic Policy Councils should serve as a dual convening body for expanding efforts in support of digital literacy, digital citizenship, and cybersecurity awareness and their intersection point in cyber citizenship. Designate a lead official in each entity to ensure follow-up. This effort can also be tied into the president’s stated priority of action items for the upcoming Summit of Democracies as a key deliverable that would both protect democracy at home and aid our allies and their youth wrestling with similar threats.
• Related federal agencies—from the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Education—should establish and coordinate multi-year research and development programs to develop, support, and test the efficacy of teaching strategies and instructional tools.
  • Studies should be designed with diversity, equity, and inclusion at the forefront so that students in lower-income communities (rural, urban, suburban) and communities of color gain access to educational materials and trained professionals and so that research studies reflect the needs and attributes of the many varied student populations in the U.S.
• The Department of Education should provide catalyzing funds in support of teacher preparation programs and collaborative programming at the state level, much in the way it has supported and motivated prior education reforms on everything from STEM to physical fitness.
• The Department of State should explore how it might support similar efforts in democracies facing similar challenges, as well as aid in drawing in lessons from allied states.
• The Department of Defense should designate a lead official in the Office of the Secretary (OSD) for monitoring and coordinating with the effort, as part of (a) its own nascent efforts at providing digital literacy training to its adult service members, and (b) the related needs within the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (the 10th largest school system in the U.S.).

State and Local Government

• Support the development and coordination of resources to ensure that instructional materials related to cyber citizenship are discoverable, accessible, aligned to standards, and up to date. Develop connections and alignment between the emerging cyber citizenship portal and other hubs that are dedicated to civics, literacy, and cybersecurity.
  • Develop systems of compensation and credit for the educators getting involved in building and sustaining these portals.
• Spur education schools and teacher preparation programs to offer courses on the teaching of these concepts (digital+media literacy, digital civics, and cybersecurity, and the intersection point of cyber citizenship) as a way to build resiliency to mis-, dis- and mal-information. Encourage coordination between education schools and professional development to help faculty stay abreast of new developments.
• Scale up sustainable in-service professional development initiatives for educators by creating exchanges for them to share stories of what works; share each other’s lesson plans, instructional materials, and teaching strategies; and work with researchers and developers in creating better tools and strategies for engaging students.
• Support the development of communities of practice that support the four action steps above. This can be done by:
  • Establishing state-to-local grant programs that bring educators and researchers together to build pilot programs and benchmark success.
  • Investing in librarians (public librarians and teacher librarians in schools) to help curate resources in partnership with other educators and to stay informed by taking on leadership positions in coalitions across literacy, civics, and cybersecurity sectors.

Philanthropic Organizations

• Assess support towards this issue space, exploring where catalyzing investment might be most effective and where efforts can be expanded.
• Encourage the development of coalitions across civics, literacy, and cybersecurity sectors to share research findings and develop materials to support educators. Invest in hubs to increase the capacity for education and research institutions to learn from each other and build sustainable pathways for exchanging information on what works.
• Make use of past investment in related initiatives. For example, millions of dollars have been spent on journalism initiatives and think tank research to explore the impact of social media companies and other platforms on information environments. Bringing lessons from those efforts to the education community—and by extension to students who will make up the next generation—is one way to leverage this investment.