The irony of the push for 'media literacy' in schools

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A study from the News Literacy Project — "Building a national movement to create systemic change in American education to ensure all students are skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school" — finds that only 20 percent of teenagers can accurately distinguish between news, advertisements, opinion and entertainment content and are not inclined to fall for online conspiracy theories.

The group seeks to convince states and local school districts to offer "media literacy instruction" in the public schools.

Enter Assemblywoman Cecelia Gonzalez, a Las Vegas Democrat who moonlights as a school teacher. She and Assemblywoman Erica Mosca, D-Las Vegas, have co-sponsored a proclamation on the subject and want the state Department of Education to expand "literacy instructions" in Nevada classrooms.

"In a time where misinformation spreads rapidly," Gonzalez said, "this is something that is very critical to us and something we look forward to bringing to Nevada."

Can the horse even see the cart off in the distance?

This is all no doubt well-intentioned. Teaching kids to develop a workable b.s. detector and to learn the difference between fact and opinion is important. But before they can develop such critical thinking skills, they must have acquired the knowledge that allows them to read and comprehend basic text and to successfully complete rudimentary numerical calculations. Test scores in Nevada and Clark County annually highlight massive deficiencies in those areas.

The timing of Gonzalez’s announcement last week was particularly ironic. Less than a week earlier, the U.S. Department of Education had released the 2024 results for the "nation’s report card." Nevada lagged behind much of the nation, with only 25% of eighth-graders deemed proficient in reading and 20% making the grade in math. Thirty-four percent of Nevada eighth-graders couldn’t meet even "basic" standards of literacy, while 41% failed to reach that level in math.

Meanwhile, Nevada scores on the ACT in 2022 were the worst in the nation among states that required all high school juniors to take the test.

Nevada’s legislative Democrats have for years obstructed virtually every proposed reform intended to boost accountability and academic achievement in the public schools, opting instead to follow the siren call of their education union benefactors to spend more and more. The results speak for themselves.

Before Gonzalez and other members of the entrenched education establishment push to include "media literacy" instruction, perhaps it would be prudent for them to first do something constructive to ensure that Nevada high school students can read, write and do elementary math when they graduate.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

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