What are the Challenges to Implementation in the U.S. Education System?

The challenge of building up resilience in the U.S. system through greater cyber citizenship skills, however, is not just about building better tools and research. It also comes from the very makeup of our education system.

As opposed to the nations that have tried to equip their students for digital skills and threats, such as Estonia and Finland, the U.S. does not have a single school system in which the national government has a central budget and authority over what is taught or how. Instead, it has a federal Department of Education that supports and steers, but the leaders of more than 18,000 school districts at the community level make most of the decisions.¹ The education agencies for each of the 50 states have considerable power too—they hold the purse strings for the majority of the funding, set standards for what students should learn and teachers should know, authorize assessments, and approve textbooks.

This uniquely American system is critical to keep in mind in any discussion of how to improve education at a large scale in the U.S. By definition, it does not just involve trying to train teachers on new methods, introduce new curricula, and so forth. It also means moving budgets and priorities across a labyrinth of bureaucracies and constituencies. One cautionary tale is what happened during the movement a decade ago to develop common academic standards for mathematics and English language arts, known as the Common Core.² Although the movement ultimately led to stronger standards adopted by 45 states, the District of Columbia, and several territories,³ it also sparked years of controversy. The debate ranged from political concerns over what was perceived as national leaders meddling in local affairs to consternation over new tests and often haphazard implementation and training at the school level. The backlash reverberates today.

Given the difficulties in promoting common standards for the seemingly uncontroversial subjects of math and reading, widespread adoption of standards for building resilience to information threats will be a challenge, to say nothing of how high the hurdles will be in trying to adapt curricula and teaching strategies to match those standards.

Yet that difficulty does not mean effort is not merited. Indeed, many efforts are already underway to develop standards in the three areas discussed above. More recently, the RAND Corporation’s Truth Decay Initiative has developed strong standards for the subset of media literacy skills needed to combat disinformation and misinformation.⁴ ISTE has integrated digital citizenship standards into the comprehensive technology standards that it encourages states and districts to adopt.

A growing number of states (14 as of June 2021) have passed legislation to promote media literacy education and digital citizenship, several of which start with adopting standards.⁵ In Florida, for example, the 2020 “Next Generation Sunshine State Standards” establish curricular core content. Among those listed in Florida standards documents are “technology-literacy skills; information and media-literacy skills; and civic-engagement skills.”⁶

Standards are crucial in setting expectations, and often the funding and training that goes to implementing them. They also matter immensely to teachers, who, for better or worse, have to teach towards them and thus shape their lesson plans and use of classroom time.

However, standards are not enough. Instead, as Media Literacy Now explains, “implementation is key.”⁷ Implementation brings together several key elements: effective, independently evaluated, research-backed tools and curricula; standards that guide and help expand use; and, most importantly, funding. Educators do not just need instructional materials that help them teach to those standards. They also require time to evaluate those materials, the ability to exchange information about what works, and training on how to integrate those materials into existing lessons.

These training needs are significant and are a particular challenge in our system. While there are many effective programs in the U.S., our country’s overall teacher preparation system is anemic. Education schools often get low marks for not delivering the knowledge and skills that future teachers need.⁸ Once teachers are hired, they rarely get robust professional development.⁹ And coursework for prospective or current teachers is often not designed to stay current on topic, most especially the issues we’ve seen in the crossing areas of cyber citizenship, like filter bubbles,¹⁰ how algorithms and recommendation engines deliver increasingly extreme news and videos, or the prevalence and tactics of disinformation.

There are important exceptions to this, which show that progress can be made with proper problem recognition and effort. The states of New Mexico and Washington, for example, have recently invested in teacher training on media literacy.¹¹

Yet overall, teacher training cannot keep up. Take the area of civics and citizenship skills. Data from RAND about American teachers’ capacity to help students develop a strong understanding of civics—a subject area that, like social studies, has been part of public schooling for decades—shows big gaps. As the RAND Corporation’s Julia H. Kaufman puts it, the data paints “a concerning picture about K–12 teachers' capacity to address civic education.”¹² A similar RAND report focused on social studies teachers also finds worrisome deficits, "especially," as the report's authors note, "in light of the fractured media landscape and the growing prevalence of disinformation.”¹³

Yet many of today’s teachers do see the urgency of providing more instruction on media literacy and digital citizenship. In answering that RAND survey question about the importance of students learning to “critically evaluate information for credibility and bias,” 82 percent of elementary school teachers and 92 percent of secondary school teachers said that this came somewhat or very close to their own views.¹⁴ And among social studies teachers, at least, there are signs of some teaching of these skills. In that same RAND study, for example, more than 80 percent of high school social studies teachers said they sought to teach students how to distinguish between fact and opinion. That same report, however, showed that a sizable percentage of social studies teachers—38 percent of those at the high school level—gave only slight emphasis or no emphasis to issues of “responsible internet use,” which in the survey included ensuring the reliability of sources and interacting responsibly on social media.¹⁵ These illustrate the continued disconnect between the issues and the classroom.

Fortunately, new instructional materials—from interactive games to multi-week lesson plans—have emerged to support teachers who strive to teach these skills. In addition, new initiatives, some based at universities and others within community educational organizations, are emerging to socialize the need for such programs and provide training to educators on how to incorporate these new tools.