From 24 to 31 October, the world marks Global Media and Information Literacy Week, an annual event first launched by UNESCO in 2011 as a way for organizations around the world to share ideas and explore innovative ways to promote media and information literacy for all. This year’s theme is Minds Over AI — MIL in Digital Spaces.
To join in the global conversation, over the next week News Decoder will present a series of articles that look at media literacy in different ways.
Today, we give you links to articles we’ve published over the past year on topics that range from fact-checking and information verification to the power of social media and the good and bad of artificial intelligence.
As reading scores remain a top concern for schools nationwide, many districts are experimenting with ability-based grouping in the early grades. The idea is to group students in multiple grade levels by their current reading level — not their grade level. A classroom could have seven kindergartners, 10 first graders, and three second graders grouped together for reading because they all read at the same level.
While this may work for some schools, in our district, Rockwood School District in Missouri, we’ve chosen a different path. We keep students together in their class during whole-class instruction — regardless of ability level — and provide support or enrichment by creating flexible groups based on instructional needs within their grade level.
We’re building skilled, confident readers not by separating them, but by growing them together.
Children, like adults, learn and grow in diverse groups. In a Rockwood classroom, every student contributes to the shared learning environment — and every student benefits from being part of it.
Our approach starts with whole-class instruction. All students, including English multilingual learners and those working toward grade-level benchmarks, participate in daily, grade-level phonics and comprehension lessons. We believe these shared experiences are foundational — not just for building literacy, but for fostering community and academic confidence.
After our explicit, whole-group lessons, students move into flexible, needs-based small groups informed by real-time data and observations. Some students receive reteaching, while others take on enrichment activities. During these blocks, differentiation is fluid: A student may need decoding help one day and vocabulary enrichment the next. No one is locked into a static tier. Every day is a new opportunity.
Students also engage in daily independent and partner reading. In addition, reading specialists provide targeted, research-based interventions for striving readers who need additional instruction.
We build movement into our instruction, as well — not as a brain break, but as a learning tool. We use gestures for phonemes, tapping for spelling and jumping to count syllables. These are “brain boosts,” helping young learners stay focused and engaged.
We challenge all students, regardless of skill level. During phonics and word work, advanced readers work with more complex texts and tasks. Emerging readers receive the time and scaffolded support they need — such as visual cues and pre-teaching or exposing students to a concept or skill before it’s formally taught during a whole-class lesson. That can help them fully participate in every class. A student might not yet be able to decode or encode every word, but they are exposed to the grade-level standards and are challenged to meet the high expectations we have for all students.
During shared and interactive reading lessons, all students are able to practice fluency and build their comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge. Through these shared experiences, every child experiences success.
There’s a common misconception that mixed-ability classrooms hold back high achievers or overwhelm striving readers. But in practice, engagement depends more on how we teach rather than who is in the room. With well-paced, multimodal lessons grounded in grade-level content, every learner finds an entry point.
You’ll see joy, movement, and mutual respect in our classrooms — because when we treat students as capable, they rise. And when we give them the right tools, not labels, they use them.
While ability grouping may seem like a practical solution, research suggests it can have a lasting downside. A Northwestern University study of nearly 12,000 students found that those placed in the lowest kindergarten reading groups rarely caught up to their peers. For example, when you group a third grader with first graders, when does the older child get caught up? Even if he learns and progresses with his ability group, he’s still two grade levels behind his third-grade peers.
This study echoes what researchers refer to as the Matthew Effect in reading: The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Lower-track students are exposed to less complex vocabulary and fewer comprehension strategies. Once placed on that path, it’s hard to catch up. Once a student is assigned a label, it’s difficult to change it — for both the student and educators.
In Rockwood, we’re confident in what we’re doing. We have effective, evidence-based curricula for Tier I phonics and comprehension, and every student receives the same whole-class instruction as every other student in their grade. Then, students receive intervention or enrichment as needed.
At the end of the 2024–25 school year, our data affirmed what we see every day. Our kindergarteners outperformed national proficiency averages in every skill group — in some cases by more than 17 percentage points, according to our Reading Horizons data. Our first and second graders outpaced national averages across nearly every domain. We don’t claim to have solved the literacy crisis — or know that our model will work for every district, school, classroom or student — but we’re building readers before gaps emerge.
We’ve learned that when every student receives strong Tier I instruction, no one gets left behind. The key isn’t separating kids by ability. It’s designing instruction that’s universally strong and strategically supported.
We recognize that every community faces distinct challenges. If you’re a district leader weighing the trade-offs of ability grouping, consider this: When you pull students out of the room during critical learning moments, the rich vocabulary, the shared texts and the academic conversation, you are not closing the learning gap, but creating a bigger one. Those critical moments build more than skills; they build readers.
In Rockwood, our data confirms what we see every day: students growing not only in skills, but also in confidence, stamina and joy. We’re proving that inclusive, grade-level-first instruction can work — and work well — for all learners.
An unexpected group of presenters–11th graders from Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago–made a splash at this year’s ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). These students captivated seasoned researchers and professionals with their insights on how school environments shape students’ views of AI. “I wanted our project to serve as a window into the eyes of high school students,” said Autumn Moon, one of the student researchers.
What enabled these students to contribute meaningfully to a conference dominated by PhDs and industry veterans was their critical data literacy–the ability to understand, question, and evaluate the ethics of complex systems like AI using data. They developed these skills through their school’s Data is Powerprogram.
Launched last year, Data is Power is a collaboration among K-12 educators, AI ethics researchers, and the Young Data Scientists League. The program includes four pilot modules that are aligned to K-12 standards and cover underexplored but essential topics in AI ethics, including labor and environmental impacts. The goal is to teach AI ethics by focusing on community-relevant topics chosen by our educators with input from students, all while fostering critical data literacy. For example, Autumn’s class in Chicago used AI ethics as a lens to help students distinguish between evidence-based research and AI propaganda. Students in Phoenix explored how conversational AI affects different neighborhoods in their city.
Why does the Data is Power program focus on critical data literacy? In my former role leading a diverse AI team at Amazon, I saw that technical skills alone weren’t enough. We needed people who could navigate cultural nuance, question assumptions, and collaborate across disciplines. Some of the most technically proficient candidates struggled to apply their knowledge to real-world problems. In contrast, team members trained in critical data literacy–those who understood both the math and the societal context of the models–were better equipped to build responsible, practical tools. They also knew when not to build something.
As AI becomes more embedded in our lives, and many students feel anxious about AI supplanting their job prospects, critical data literacy is a skill that is not just future-proof–it is future-necessary. Students (and all of us) need the ability to grapple with and think critically about AI and data in their lives and careers, no matter what they choose to pursue. As Milton Johnson, a physics and engineering teacher at Bioscience High School in Phoenix, told me: “AI is going to be one of those things where, as a society, we have a responsibility to make sure everyone has access in multiple ways.”
Critical data literacy is as much about the humanities as it is about STEM. “AI is not just for computer scientists,” said Karren Boatner, who taught Autumn in her English literature class at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School. For Karren, who hadn’t considered herself a “math person” previously, one of the most surprising parts of the program was how much she and her students enjoyed a game-based module that used middle school math to explain how AI “learns.” Connecting math and literature to culturally relevant, real-world issues helps students see both subjects in a new light.
As AI continues to reshape our world, schools must rethink how to teach about it. Critical data literacy helps students see the relevance of what they’re learning, empowering them to ask better questions and make more informed decisions. It also helps educators connect classroom content to students’ lived experiences.
If education leaders want to prepare students for the future–not just as workers, but as informed citizens–they must invest in critical data literacy now. As Angela Nguyen, one of our undergraduate scholars from Stanford, said in her Data is Power talk: “Data is power–especially youth and data. All of us, whether qualitative or quantitative, can be great collectors of meaningful data that helps educate our own communities.”
Evan Shieh, Young Data Scientists League
Evan Shieh is the Executive Director of the Young Data Scientists League.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)
Literacy has always been the foundation of learning, but for middle school students, the stakes are especially high. These years mark the critical shift from learning to read to reading to learn.
When students enter sixth, seventh, or eighth grade still struggling with foundational skills, every subject becomes harder–science labs, social studies texts, even math word problems require reading proficiency. For educators, the challenge is not just addressing gaps but also building the confidence that helps adolescents believe they can succeed.
The confidence gap
By middle school, many students are keenly aware when they’re behind their peers in reading. Interventions that feel too elementary can undermine motivation. As Dr. Michelle D. Barrett, Senior Vice President of Research, Policy, and Impact at Edmentum, explained:
“If you have a student who’s in the middle grades and still has gaps in foundational reading skills, they need to be provided with age-appropriate curriculum and instruction. You can’t give them something that feels babyish–that only discourages them.”
Designing for engagement
Research shows that engagement is just as important as instruction, particularly for adolescents. “If students aren’t engaged, if they’re not showing up to school, then you have a real problem,” Barrett said. “It’s about making sure that even if students have gaps, they’re still being supported with curriculum that feels relevant and engaging.”
To meet that need, digital programs like Edmentum’s Exact Path tailor both design and content to the learner’s age. “A middle schooler doesn’t want the cartoony things our first graders get,” Barrett noted. “That kind of thing really does matter–not just for engagement, but also for their confidence and willingness to keep going.”
Measuring what works
Educators also need strong data to target interventions. “It’s all about how you’re differentiating for those students,” Barrett said. “You’ve got to have great assessments, engaging content that’s evidence-based, and a way for students to feel and understand success.”
Exact Path begins with universal screening, then builds personalized learning paths grounded in research-based reading progressions. More than 60 studies in the past two years have shown consistent results. “When students complete eight skills per semester, we see significant growth across grade levels–whether measured by NWEA MAP, STAR, or state assessments,” Barrett added.
That growth extends across diverse groups. “In one large urban district, we found the effect sizes for students receiving special education services were twice that of their peers,” Barrett said. “That tells us the program can be a really effective literacy intervention for students most at risk.”
Layering supports for greater impact
Barrett emphasized that literacy progress is strongest when multiple supports are combined. “With digital curriculum, students do better. But with a teacher on top of that digital curriculum, they do even better. Add intensive tutoring, and outcomes improve again,” she said.
Progress monitoring and recognition also help build confidence. “Students are going to persist when they can experience success,” Barrett added. “Celebrating growth, even in small increments, matters for motivation.”
A shared mission
While tools like Exact Path provide research-backed support, Barrett stressed that literacy improvement is ultimately a shared responsibility. “District leaders should be asking: How is this program serving students across different backgrounds? Is it working for multilingual learners, students with IEPs, students who are at risk?” she said.
The broader goal, she emphasized, is preparing students for lifelong learning. “Middle school is such an important time. If we can help students build literacy and confidence there, we’re not just improving test scores–we’re giving them the skills to succeed in every subject, and in life.”
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
As a way to help all of academia, colleges, universities, and other educational institutions around the world, I introduce the “Compass Framework for AI Literacy Integration into Higher Education.” This is a completely free (Creative Commons 4.0) AI literacy framework for easy and flexible integration of AI literacy into the curriculum. This framework is designed from my experience working with many universities around the world, reviewing other AI frameworks, and from various other research.
The AI literacy components are made up of: Awareness, Capability (including prompt engineering), Knowledge, and Critical Thinking (to include bias, ethics, environmental impacts, and avoiding overreliance.
This AI literacy framework also addresses student learning outcomes and provides specific examples of how this framework can be integrated without necessarily increasing credit requirements. Additional information is also presented dealing with needed subskills, advanced AI skills for degree-specific fields, alternative frameworks, and additional actions needed to ensure overall success with AI literacy integration.
An introductory video on this important and free AI literacy framework is available through the Sovorel Center for Teaching & Learning educational YouTube channel here:
The Compass Framework for AI Literacy Integration into Higher Education has been designed and made available for free by the Sovorel Center for Teaching & Learning. Please let us know you have used it, it has been helpful for your organization, or if you have any other feedback. Thank you very much, and we appreciate everyone’s ongoing support.
These days, we see a hyper-focus on news literacy (or news media literacy), which is the aspect of media literacy that centers on analyzing journalism. While muckraking in politics and other such biased and editorial takes on the news are not new, the 24/7 firehose of content to be consumed across all media platforms is. And the good and the bad of it all is that anyone can be a content creator these days, but content or “news” is not necessarily unbiased, objective, or based on research.
What is news literacy?
News literacy is an aspect of media literacy that aims to teach news consumers to be thoughtful about the content they are seeking out, digesting, internalizing, and sharing, whether from online or more traditional media. Examples of news literacy can be woven across the curriculum, as news literacy consists of the critical thinking skills that help us determine fact from fiction, bias from fairness, and opinion from news.
“Media literacy is critical to the survival and perpetuation of a healthy democracy.”
Why is news literacy important for students to learn?
The evaluation skills core of news literacy helps readers determine the credibility, validity, and reliability of news sources and newer sources of information. Google research scientist Daniel Russell hypothesizes that students today can access a million times more content via the internet than earlier generations could at a university library. Thus, today’s readers need a much more dynamic and sophisticated set of reading skills when they are consuming and analyzing traditional and online media. In our 21st century digital landscape, students must learn to navigate raw information from countless sources. Examples of news literacy should be reinforced daily. These digital citizenship skills are foundational to maintaining a positive school culture. News media literacy skills are a crucial part of learning to read and write for today’s and tomorrow’s society.
There are many ways to weave examples of news literacy into daily instruction in the classroom, especially when you take a cross-curricular approach. Seek out high quality resources that build foundational literacy skills, yet do so in a current and engaging way. Flocabulary leverages storytelling and emotional connections via hip-hop to make learning memorable. Flocabulary’s interdisciplinary lessons and activities challenge students to think creatively and critically when it comes to comprehension and vocabulary acquisition across K-12 subjects.
New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.
Teaching news literacy: 10 media literacy examples in action
1. Understand the key terms
It’s best to begin news literacy instruction by having students understand that news content and sources should be valid, credible, and reliable. But what do those key terms mean?
Valid: having a sound base in fact or logic
Credible: trustworthy and believable
Reliable: reputable and verifiable
Author Michael A. Caulfield of Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers advises that when it comes to determining if a news source represents fair and accurate coverage, you need to consider the following: (1) machinery of care, (2) transparency, (3) expertise, and (4) agenda.
2. Seek out age-appropriate content
While the copy in The New York Times ranks at a 10th-grade reading level, that doesn’t mean the content is appropriate or written for a 10th-grader. Making sure that kids and teens have access to developmentally appropriate content will quite simply help them understand what they are reading.
Find recommended news sources for students of all ages from familiar sources like Time, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Scholastic on Common Sense’sBest News Sources for Kids.
Flocabulary’s Week in Rap is a robust and age-appropriate educational tool for instructing students about current events. This weekly video-based lesson provides a rapped summary of significant and relevant news stories of the week. Released every Friday, it keeps students informed about the latest happenings and offers teachers a platform to initiate discussions on crucial current events. The Week in Rap is for grades 6-12, and the Week in Rap Junior is for grades 3-5. These weekly videos are a student (and teacher) favorite!
The Flocabulary team starts crafting these videos from scratch on Monday and completes them – including songs, videos, and associated lesson materials – by Friday morning for educators to access on Flocabulary.com. Learn more about how the Week in Rap is made.
3. Cross-examine the news content
Current events – whether political, regional, or pop – need to be vetted with a critical lens to equip students with the ability to participate in civic society in meaningful ways. Students need to be detectives of sorts, and they need to be equipped with news-literate strategies to decode what they are reading, from news to advertisements to propaganda. Misinformation or fake news can be insidious and lead to misunderstandings and unyielding perspectives. Media literate students understand that every source has a point of view, and media literacy examples need to be inquiry-based and should lead to constructive discourse.
According to Project Look Sharp, all readers should ask themselves the following six questions. Use these questions to have your students cross-examine news content:
Who made this?
Who is the target audience?
Who paid for this? Or who gets paid if you click on this?
Who might benefit or be harmed by this message?
What is left out of this media message that might be important?
Is this credible information (and what makes you think that)?
4. Address clickbait headlines and misinformation
The six questions above will help students better uncover the intention of said content. Too often, the content is designed to be a fabrication that is sticky and sensationalized to grab eyeballs and pique interest. Such clickbait helps content go viral, and we inadvertently become super-spreaders of misinformation, especially on social media, which can help earn advertiser dollars. However, this content can lead to confirmation bias, bolstered by details that are deceptive or even downright inaccurate.
We all need to keep asking questions to push past our own preconceived notions and broaden our understanding and perspectives around the topic at hand. Make it a habit for students to consider those six questions when reading and analyzing traditional or online media, whether they are digesting morning news or diving deeper into researching a current or historical event.
5. Teach how to evaluate website credibility and bias
There are certain signs or signals that all consumers of information should look for when evaluating online news sources. There are hallmark indicators that a site may not be as valid, credible, or reliable as we’d assume. We all should check if the site comes from reputable and accessible creators, the site itself is professional and polished, and the content is framed objectively and unbiased.
Teach students how to take a quick inventory of a site’s homepage in order to evaluate the quality of content, from the top to the bottom:
Begin with the URL – is it secure (HTTPS)? Is it a .org, .edu, or .gov URL?
Who owns the domain?
Scroll down to the About Us page and judge how robust it is or isn’t.
Can you find the source’s contact information easily enough?
Analyze the layout and design.
Are there source links and citations?
Are there typos or grammatical errors?
Analyze the language used: How inflammatory is the language?
What is the tone of the headline? How is information framed?
All these signs can help determine if the content shared has a bias, whether implicit or overt. As an educator, you can use sites like FactCheck.org and Snopes.com to fact-check the details of any questionable content. Then, teach students to similarly cross-reference information to make sure that they are getting the full picture.
Flocabulary’s Source Evaluation video-based lesson provides students with tips on how to assess website credibility and bias, incorporating important vocabulary words that enhance their understanding. It aligns with today’s digital age and empowers students to make informed decisions in a technology-driven society, making it a valuable resource when teaching students about media literacy evaluation skills and information literacy.
6. Teach smart searching strategies
A core digital literacy skill to teach students that is fundamental to news literacy is smart searching. There are tried-and-true search strategies to help serve up content beyond what is targeted toward you, the reader, or tracked from your past searches. Emphasize to students that when searching for what you need, you often have to filter out what you don’t need. Teach them how to use quotation marks to search for exact phrases, use Boolean operators (“and”/”or”) to combine terms, and narrow the time frame as well as the type of sources. Highlight that when you get the page of search results, you should look for the results that are not sponsored, those that come from sources you recognize, or those that are well-vetted and reviewed. Challenge your students to work backward to find the original source.
7. Try lateral reading
Lateral reading – championed by Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) – is when you approach fact-checking by reading more broadly about a subject versus more deeply on a subject. By searching for other articles on the same topic, you can help confirm or negate an author’s credibility as well as his/her intent and biases. Those who engage in lateral reading often have multiple tabs open, creating a network of fact-checking across various websites before going back to the original article or page to read more thoroughly.
By teaching your students the concept of lateral reading, they will become more adept at cross-checking information from a variety of sources versus relying on just one. They will become more robust researchers and informed critical thinkers as they continue to dive into newsworthy events.
“Lateral reading helps the reader understand both the perspective from which the site’s analyses come and if the site has an editorial process or expert reputation that would allow one to accept the truth of a site’s facts.”
As with any muscle, it is important for students (and readers of all ages) to exercise how they read the news stories around current events and practice their detective decoding skills. Weave current events into your teaching to help students develop a real-world perspective on issues and better understand how their studies apply to life outside the school’s walls. Illustrate how news can report differently on the same topic. Use All Sides’ Media Bias Chart to show how a narrative can be skewed by who is reporting and why.
Use the Week in Rap lesson videos every Friday to have students stay on top of current events. Assign students the lesson so they can go through each activity and assessment accompanied by the video. While watching the video, turn on the Discuss Mode to prompt discussion questions for the class.
9. Talk about fake news often
Realizing how prevalent fake news is is half the battle. As with most literacy skills, repetition is key! Share key messages over and over in the classroom so that these healthy habits of mind become a given when students seek out reliable news. Frame lessons around spotting fake news or misinformation in articles. Send home resources that engage the whole family, from information videos to quizzes, so they all can help one another not become super-spreaders of misinformation or fake news online.
Flocabulary’s Fake News video-based lesson helps teach students about the pressing issue of fake news. This lesson explores what fake news is, how it spreads, and how to discern its accuracy. It equips students with practical skills for identifying fake news, encourages critical thinking about personal biases, and fosters media literacy.
Here are some additional resources teachers can use or share:
10. Continue to teach these skills year-round with reliable educational resources
Celebrate U.S. Media Literacy Week (October 23-27, 2023) and News Literacy Week (end of January each year) not as a one-and-done annual event but as a way to emphasize just how critical these skills are. Underscore the growing need around the importance of media literacy education, especially during times of political races, global strife, and national emergencies. Play devil’s advocate in your questioning to encourage readers to consider all sides and all perspectives as they gather facts. When students become skilled in this, they can critically evaluate information, which is essential for keeping society as well-informed as possible
Lean on trustworthy organizations that produce educational resources around news media literacy examples for students, families, and educators. With an ever-changing tech landscape, it is crucial that we all be diligent students to learn how to dissect and digest the latest and greatest information shared in our dynamic, always-on multimedia world.
Here are some more resources:
Start teaching about news literacy with Flocabulary
As readers and as good digital citizens, the burden falls on each of us 24/7 to use our critical thinking skills when digesting media information. Whether you teach elementary, middle, or high school, educators can help teach students these mindsets to employ on their own when browsing social media, paging through newspapers, or watching nightly reports. Similarly, they can use the same critical lens when receiving articles or news sites from others or when planning to send out information to others. By honing these skills, students develop the confidence and ability to participate in important conversations and decisions that impact their communities.
New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.
A new national study shows that Americans’ rates of reading for pleasure have declined radically over the first quarter of this century and that recreational reading can be linked to school achievement, career compensation and growth, civic engagement, and health. Learning how to enjoy reading – not literacy proficiency – isn’t just for hobbyists, it’s a necessary life skill.
But the conditions under which English teachers work are detrimental to the cause – and while book bans are in the news, the top-down pressure to measure up on test scores is a more pervasive, more longstanding culprit. Last year, we asked high school English teachers to describe their literature curriculum in a national questionnaire we plan to publish soon. From responses representing 48 states, we heard a lot of the following: “soul-deadening”; “only that which students will see on the test” and “too [determined] by test scores.”
These sentiments certainly aren’t new. In a similar questionnaire distributed in 1911, teachers described English class as “deadening,” focused on “memory instead of thinking,” and demanding “cramming for examination.”
Teaching to the test is as old as English itself – as a secondary school subject, that is. Teachers have questioned the premise for just as long because too many have experienced a radical disconnect between how they are asked or required to teach and the pleasure that reading brings them.
High school English was first established as a test-driven subject around the turn of the 20th Century. Even at a time when relatively few Americans attended college, English class was oriented around building students’ mastery of now-obscure literary works that they would encounter on the College Entrance Exam.
The development of the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1926 and the growth of standardized testing since No Child Left Behind have only solidified what was always true: As much as we think of reading as a social, cultural, even “spiritual” experience, English class has been shaped by credential culture.
Throughout, many teachers felt that preparing students for college was too limited a goal; their mission was to prepare students for life. They believed that studying literature was an invaluable source of social and emotional development, preparing adolescents for adulthood and for citizenship. It provided them with “vicarious experience”: Through reading, young people saw other points of view, worked through challenging problems, and grappled with complex issues.
Indeed, a national study conducted in 1933 asked teachers to rank their “aims” in literature instruction. They listed “vicarious experience” first, “preparation for college” last.
The results might not look that different today. Ask an English teacher what brought her to the profession, and a love of reading is likely to top the list. What is different today is the unmatched pressure to prepare students for a constant cycle of state and national examinations and for college credentialing.
Increasingly, English teachers are compelled to use online curriculum packages that mimic the examinations themselves, composed largely of excerpts from literary and “informational” texts instead of the whole books that were more the norm in previous generations. “Vicarious experience” has less purchase in contemporary academic standards than ever.
Credentialing, however, does not equal preparing. Very few higher education skills map neatly onto standardized exams, especially in the humanities. As English professors, we can tell you that an enjoyment of reading – not just a toleration of it – is a key academic capacity. It produces better writers, more creative thinkers, and students less likely to need AI to express their ideas effectively.
Yet we haven’t given K-12 teachers the structure or freedom to treat reading enjoyment as a skill. The data from our national survey suggests that English teachers and their students find the system deflating.
“Our district adopted a disjointed, excerpt-heavy curriculum two years ago,” a Washington teacher shared, “and it is doing real damage to students’ interest in reading.”
From Tennessee, a teacher added: “I understand there are state guidelines and protocols, but it seems as if we are teaching the children from a script. They are willing to be more engaged and can have a better understanding when we can teach them things that are relatable to them.”
And from Oregon, another tells us that because “state testing is strictly excerpts,” the district initially discouraged “teaching whole novels.” It changed course only after students’ exam scores improved.
Withholding books from students is especially inhumane when we consider that the best tool for improved academic performance is engagement – students learn more when they become engrossed in stories. Yet by the time they graduate from high school, many students master test-taking skills but lose the window for learning to enjoy reading.
Teachers tell us that the problem is not attitudinal but structural. An education technocracy that consists of test making agencies, curriculum providers, and policy makers is squeezing out enjoyment, teacher autonomy and student agency.
To reverse this trend, we must consider what reading experiences we are providing our students. Instead of the self-defeating cycle of test-preparation and testing, we should take courage, loosen the grip on standardization, and let teachers recreate the sort of experiences with literature that once made us, and them, into readers.
Everywhere you look, someone is telling students and workers to “learn AI.”
It’s become the go-to advice for staying employable, relevant and prepared for the future. But here’s the problem: While definitions of artificial intelligence literacy are starting to emerge, we still lack a consistent, measurable framework to know whether someone is truly ready to use AI effectively and responsibly.
And that is becoming a serious issue for education and workforce systems already being reshaped by AI. Schools and colleges are redesigning their entire curriculums. Companies are rewriting job descriptions. States are launching AI-focused initiatives.
Yet we’re missing a foundational step: agreeing not only on what we mean by AI literacy, but on howweassessit in practice.
Two major recent developments underscore why this step matters, and why it is important that we find a way to take it before urging students to use AI. First, the U.S. Department of Education released its proposed priorities for advancing AI in education, guidance that will ultimately shape how federal grants will support K-12 and higher education. For the first time, we now have a proposed federal definition of AI literacy: the technical knowledge, durable skills and future-ready attitudes required to thrive in a world influenced by AI. Such literacy will enable learners to engage and create with, manage and design AI, while critically evaluating its benefits, risks and implications.
Second, we now have the White House’s American AI Action Plan, a broader national strategy aimed at strengthening the country’s leadership in artificial intelligence. Education and workforce development are central to the plan.
What both efforts share is a recognition that AI is not just a technological shift, it’s a human one. In many ways, the most important AI literacy skills are not about AI itself, but about the human capacities needed to use AI wisely.
Sadly, the consequences of shallow AI education are already visible in workplaces. Some 55 percent of managers believe their employees are AI-proficient, while only 43 percent of employees share that confidence, according to the 2025 ETS Human Progress Report.
One can say that the same perception gap exists between school administrators and teachers. The disconnect creates risks for organizations and reveals how assumptions about AI literacy can diverge sharply from reality.
But if we’re going to build AI literacy into every level of learning, we have to ask the harder question: How do we both determine when someone is truly AI literate and assess it in ways that are fair, useful and scalable?
AI literacy may be new, but we don’t have to start from scratch to measure it. We’ve tackled challenges like this before, moving beyond check-the-box tests in digital literacy to capture deeper, real-world skills. Building on those lessons will help define and measure this next evolution of 21st-century skills.
Right now, we often treat AI literacy as a binary: You either “have it” or you don’t. But real AI literacy and readiness is more nuanced. It includes understanding how AI works, being able to use it effectively in real-world settings and knowing when to trust it. It includes writing effective prompts, spotting bias, asking hard questions and applying judgment.
This isn’t just about teaching coding or issuing a certificate. It’s about making sure that students, educators and workers can collaborate in and navigate a world in which AI is increasingly involved in how we learn, hire, communicate and make decisions.
Without a way to measure AI literacy, we can’t identify who needs support. We can’t track progress. And we risk letting a new kind of unfairness take root, in which some communities build real capacity with AI and others are left with shallow exposure and no feedback.
What can education leaders do right now to address this issue? I have a few ideas.
First, we need a working definition of AI literacy that goes beyond tool usage. The Department of Education’s proposed definition is a good start, combining technical fluency, applied reasoning and ethical awareness.
Second, assessments of AI literacy should be integrated into curriculum design. Schools and colleges incorporating AI into coursework need clear definitions of proficiency. TeachAI’s AI Literacy Framework for Primary and Secondary Education is a great resource.
Third, AI proficiency must be defined and measured consistently, or we risk a mismatched state of literacy. Without consistent measurements and standards, one district may see AI literacy as just using ChatGPT, while another defines it far more broadly, leaving students unevenly ready for the next generation of jobs.
To prepare for an AI-driven future, defining and measuring AI literacy must be a priority. Every student will be graduating into a world in which AI literacy is essential. Human resources leaders confirmed in the 2025 ETS Human Progress Report that the No. 1 skill employers are demanding today is AI literacy. Without measurement, we risk building the future on assumptions, not readiness.
And that’s too shaky a foundation for the stakes ahead.
Amit Sevak is CEO of ETS, the largest private educational assessment organization in the world.
This story about AI literacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story was reported by and originally published by APM Reports in connection with its podcast Sold a Story: How Teach Kids to Read Went So Wrong.
When voters elected Donald Trump in November, most people who worked at the U.S. Department of Education weren’t scared for their jobs. They had been through a Trump presidency before, and they hadn’t seen big changes in their department then. They saw their work as essential, mandated by law, nonpartisan and, as a result, insulated from politics.
Then, in early February, the Department of Government Efficiency showed up. Led at the time by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, and known by the cheeky acronym DOGE, it gutted the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, posting on X that the effort would ferret out “waste, fraud and abuse.”
DOGE is looking for help from the general public!
Please DM insight for reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, along with any helpful insights or awesome ideas, to the relevant DOGE affiliates (found on the Affiliates tab). For example, @DOGE_USDA, @DOGE_SSA, etc. We will add…
A post from the Department of Government Efficiency.
When it was done, DOGE had cut approximately $900 million in research contracts and more than 90 percent of the institute’s workforce had been laid off. (The current value of the contracts was closer to $820 million, data compiled by APM Reports shows, and the actual savings to the government was substantially less, because in some cases large amounts of money had been spent already.)
Among staff cast aside were those who worked on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — which is one of the few federal education initiatives the Trump administration says it sees as valuable and wants to preserve.
The assessment is a series of tests administered nearly every year to a national sample of more than 10,000 students in grades 4, 8 and 12. The tests regularly measure what students across the country know in reading, math and other subjects. They allow the government to track how well America’s students are learning overall. Researchers can also combine the national data with the results of tests administered by states to draw comparisons between schools and districts in different states.
The assessment is “something we absolutely need to keep,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at an education and technology summit in San Diego earlier this year. “If we don’t, states can be a little manipulative with their own results and their own testing. I think it’s a way that we keep everybody honest.”
But researchers and former Department of Education employees say they worry that the test will become less and less reliable over time, because the deep cuts will cause its quality to slip — and some already see signs of trouble.
“The main indication is that there just aren’t the staff,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor who uses the testing data to research gaps in learning between students of different income levels.
All but one of the experts who make sure the questions in the assessment are fair and accurate — called psychometricians — have been laid off from the National Center for Education Statistics. These specialists play a key role in updating the test and making sure it accurately measures what students know.
“These are extremely sophisticated test assessments that required a team of researchers to make them as good as they are,” said Mark Seidenberg, a researcher known for his significant contributions to the science of reading. Seidenberg added that “a half-baked” assessment would undermine public confidence in the results, which he described as “essentially another way of killing” the assessment.
The Department of Education defended its management of the assessment in an email: “Every member of the team is working toward the same goal of maintaining NAEP’s gold-standard status,” it read in part.
The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policies for the national test, said in a statement that it had temporarily assigned “five staff members who have appropriate technical expertise (in psychometrics, assessment operations, and statistics) and federal contract management experience” to work at the National Center for Education Statistics. No one from DOGE responded to a request for comment.
Harvard education professor Andrew Ho, a former member of the governing board, said the remaining staff are capable, but he’s concerned that there aren’t enough of them to prevent errors.
“In order to put a good product up, you need a certain number of person-hours, and a certain amount of continuity and experience doing exactly this kind of job, and that’s what we lost,” Ho said.
The Trump administration has already delayed the release of some testing data following the cutbacks. The Department of Education had previously planned to announce the results of the tests for 8th grade science, 12th grade math and 12th grade reading this summer; now that won’t happen until September. The board voted earlier this year to eliminate more than a dozen tests over the next seven years, including fourth grade science in 2028 and U.S. history for 12th graders in 2030. The governing board has also asked Congress to postpone the 2028 tests to 2029, citing a desire to avoid releasing test results in an election year.
“Today’s actions reflect what assessments the Governing Board believes are most valuable to stakeholders and can be best assessed by NAEP at this time, given the imperative for cost efficiencies,” board chair and former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue said earlier this year in a press release.
The National Assessment Governing Board canceled more than a dozen tests when it revised the schedule for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in April. This annotated version of the previous schedule, adopted in 2023, shows which tests were canceled. Topics shown in all caps were scheduled for a potential overhaul; those annotated with a red star are no longer scheduled for such a revision.
Recent estimates peg the annual cost to keep the national assessment running at about $190 million per year, a fraction of the department’s 2025 budget of approximately $195 billion.
Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, said multiple contracts with private firms — overseen by Department of Education staff with “substantial expertise” — are the backbone of the national test.
“You need a staff,” said Gamoran, who was nominated last year to lead the Institute of Education Sciences. He was never confirmed by the Senate. “The fact that NCES now only has three employees indicates that they can’t possibly implement NAEP at a high level of quality, because they lack the in-house expertise to oversee that work. So that is deeply troubling.”
The cutbacks were widespread — and far outside of what most former employees had expected under the new administration.
“I don’t think any of us imagined this in our worst nightmares,” said a former Education Department employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. “We weren’t concerned about the utter destruction of this national resource of data.”
“At what point does it break?” the former employee asked.
Every state has its own test for reading, math and other subjects. But state tests vary in difficulty and content, which makes it tricky to compare results in Minnesota to Mississippi or Montana.
“They’re totally different tests with different scales,” Reardon said. “So NAEP is the Rosetta stone that lets them all be connected.”
Reardon and his team at Stanford used statistical techniques to combine the federal assessment results with state test scores and other data sets to create the Educational Opportunity Project. The project, first released in 2016 and updated periodically in the years that followed, shows which schools and districts are getting the best results — especially for kids from poor families. Since the project’s release, Reardon said, the data has been downloaded 50,000 times and is used by researchers, teachers, parents, school boards and state education leaders to inform their decisions.
For instance, the U.S. military used the data to measure school quality when weighing base closures, and superintendents used it to find demographically similar but higher-performing districts to learn from, Reardon said.
If the quality of the data slips, those comparisons will be more difficult to make.
“My worry is we just have less-good information on which to base educational decisions at the district, state and school level,” Reardon said. “We would be in the position of trying to improve the education system with no information. Sort of like, ‘Well, let’s hope this works. We won’t know, but it sounds like a good idea.’”
Seidenberg, the reading researcher, said the national assessment “provided extraordinarily important, reliable information about how we’re doing in terms of teaching kids to read and how literacy is faring in the culture at large.”
Producing a test without keeping the quality up, Seidenberg said, “would be almost as bad as not collecting the data at all.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In the 1980s, a public interest law group sued the state of New Jersey, saying that the way it funded education left its low-income, urban school districts at a disadvantage compared to wealthier, suburban districts.
The lawsuit, Abbott v. Burke, yielded a number of different decisions, including a requirement that the state offer free, full-day, high-quality preschool for children ages 3 and 4 in 31 school districts.
This new school year marks the 26th since the program was created. Researchers have found that children who attend the preschool program are better prepared for school later on, but enrollment has been dwindling. And with New Jersey leaders now focused on bringing preschool to all districts, supporters worry that the early learning program focused on children in low-income areas may not get the attention it needs.
Park perk for kids
Did you know every fourth grader and their family can get free admission to national parks, monuments and forests? The Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All program launched in 2015 and offers free passes each school year. Vouchers for students can be downloaded through the program’s official website.
This story about free preschool was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the early childhood newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
