Illinois Becomes the First State to Require Media Literacy Classes for High School Students

Amidst a new era of widespread misinformation on elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, and vaccines, some states are pushing back: Illinois recently enacted a law requiring high schools to teach media literacy.

While many schools in the state and throughout the country teach media literacy in some way or another, Illinois is the first state in the nation to make it compulsory.

Starting in the 2022-2023 school year, high schools in Illinois will provide instruction for students to learn how to analyze and communicate information from a variety of mediums, including digital, interactive, audio, visual, and print.

“Ever since Donald Trump and ‘fake news,’ people I know believe lots of stuff that isn’t true. There’s so much motivation to spread propaganda because of the political situation.”

The law also asks students to consider how media affects information consumption as well as its impact on human emotions and behaviors. A civics and social responsibility section allows students to engage with each other in thoughtful, respectful, and inclusive dialogue.

The bill passed the General Assembly almost exclusively along party lines, with only three Republican state senators voting for it. Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, signed the bill into law on July 9, 2021. It amends the state’s school code to add media literacy to the already required computer literacy mandate.

The Chicago-based Illinois Library Association (ILA) and the Seneca-based Association of Illinois School Library Educators (AISLE) championed the passage of the media literacy law.

AISLE President Mary Jo Matousek tells The Progressive that her organization has been fighting for a literacy requirement over the past three years, as librarians have witnessed first-hand the tsunami of misleading information which can lead students—and their parents, too—towards harmful conclusions.Students from fourth grade up will “just Google it,” Matousek says. “They think that’s all there is to research. That’s not the case at all. Not everything on Google is trustworthy.”

Matousek, a librarian for thirty-three years, used to teach media literacy to fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. She tells a story about one of her classes researching the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

One website a student used was fine, she says, but another accessed from home was “put out by, I believe, a neo-Nazi group. So it wasn’t the same information at all.”

She says media literacy isn’t just about finding information, but also evaluating it and asking, “Who’s putting the information out there?” It includes teaching methods to help students understand viewpoints, reporting, opinions, use of facts, and context.

Of the two million students in Illinois’s 908 public school districts, 96 percent have access to a school library media center, according to a 2004 ILA report. However, 16 percent of Illinois school libraries have no staff, and 35 percent of the people in charge have no library training. Schools that do have libraries and trained librarians often don’t have the budget for the databases. The annual budgets for almost 60 percent of the school libraries in Illinois did not exceed $5,000 each. The average spent on school libraries in the state was a mere $8,600 each.

While the percentages and budget amounts have changed since then, the need for adequate school library resources and funding has not.

“We have asked time and time again for the state to level the playing field by subscribing to some databases, so that students all across the state would have access to the same information,” Matousek says. “There’s just no way you can afford everything you need to buy.”

Illinois’s media literacy law, part of a wave of progressive legislation in this Democrat-controlled Midwestern state, passed the House, sixty-eight to forty-four, without a single Republican voting in favor. In the Senate, the vote was forty-two to fifteen, with three Republicans voting in favor and fifteen against.

The bill’s chief Senate sponsor, Karina Villa, says her Republican colleagues who voted in favor are “reasonable people” who want to make sure “their constituents and the future generations are well-informed.” But other Republicans were scathing in their condemnation.

Among them was state Representative Adam Niemerg, who told the media that the bill was “anti-Trump, anti-conservative” and an attempt by the left “to get into our school systems at a young age and teach them the means of mainstream media.”

Villa says instead of turning media literacy into a partisan issue, she would “challenge” her colleagues to think about what they would want their own children to learn.

“I have a lot of Republican family members and friends,” she says. “One of the things that unifies us is wanting to make sure we have quality education for our children. When we were students, we knew where the fiction section was and where the nonfiction section was.”

It’s not just adults who want students to know the difference between fact and fiction. Fifteen-year-old Elijah Libretti, my bonus son who is an incoming sophomore at Chicago’s Senn High School, says he thinks a media literacy class would be a good idea.

“Ever since Donald Trump and ‘fake news,’ people I know believe lots of stuff that isn’t true,” he says, adding that now is a good time to require media literacy.

“There’s so much motivation to spread propaganda because of the political situation,” he says.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which has been locked in a battle with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) over COVID-19 safety standards and protocols, did not take a position on the media literacy bill, says Kurt Hilgendorf, CTU’s legislative and policy director.

However, he says, the union has a “long track record” of supporting various “unit of instruction” initiatives, such as Black, Asian, Latinx and LGBTQ+ history, similar to “the consumer education requirement in Illinois or the Constitution test requirement.”

Hilgendorf says that developing lesson plans is not a one-size fits all approach. Teachers who tend to be highly skilled in curriculum development and student engagement will take the state’s core ideas and broaden them.

Students of color make up more than half of the students in the state and at CPS, and the curriculum needs to reflect the “students we serve,” he says. “We need to ensure that a broad variety of perspectives are included, not just what would show up on Fox News.”

Hilgendorf links Illinois Republican opposition to the new law to the national GOP’s eagerness to “whip up” its base to be “opposed to something” including mask mandates, vaccines, and their favorite target: critical race theory.

What these people stand for is much less clear, he says.

As to Illinois becoming the first in the nation to require media literacy, Villa has a message to the rest of the nation: “I hope that the other forty-nine jump right on and say, ‘Let’s do this, too.’ ”