Is Illinois' Media Literacy Law Working?
Illinois’ law requiring media literacy education in high schools, the first of its kind in the nation, has been implemented unevenly, in part because vague language meant to offer flexibility led teachers to interpret it differently, according to a study co-authored by School of Education and Social Policy alumnus Michael Spikes (PhD23).
Since 2021, twenty-five states that have passed media literacy laws, with eight of them instituting requirements, following Illinois’ lead. “That’s significant, and a real win for advocates,” said Spikes, director of the Teach for Chicago Journalism project at Northwestern Medill and co-founder of the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition, a collaborative of Illinois educators and scholars working to improve and build models for media literacy education in public schools.
But things fall short when it comes to implementation, he said. The study, Examining the Promise and Peril of Media Literacy Education Mandates in Illinois Public High Schools, published in the journal Educational Policy, shows that Illinois’ requirement successfully raised educators’ awareness of media literacy education, and its importance. But it left teachers wondering how to put it into action in their classrooms. “That gap produced real confusion,” he said.
The study comes as concerns about technology’s effects on young people have reached the courts, including Meta’s $18 billion settlement in August with states to fund youth mental health and digital safety programs, and a $25 billion settlement in October for misleading consumers over privacy.
It was coauthored by Anna Kozlowska-Barrios, associate professor and reference and liaison librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Yonty Friesem, director of the Media Education Lab and associate professor of civic media at Columbia College Chicago, and co-founder of the IIllinois Media Literacy Coalition.
Spikes recently spoke with Erin Karter of Northwestern’s Office of Global Marketing and Communications.
Q: What is the goal of media literacy?
A: To get people comfortable with complexity, understanding that reality is full of contradictions and trade-offs. It’s not simply fact-checking one’s way to a single correct answer. Media literacy education prompts us to ask a harder question than whether a technology tool is good or bad. Instead, it asks: How much of it is too much?
Q: Is limiting or banning the use of smartphones and social media by young people in school effective?
A: Bans are largely window dressing: a visible response that lets school leaders and policymakers say they’ve done something about the broader anxiety around young people’s technology use, even as the underlying problem goes unaddressed. We’re also seeing pushback against classroom uses of Chromebooks and iPads. We will not be able to ban our way into a workable future; the genie is out of the bottle, and young people will need these tools as part of their working lives, regardless of what we think they are using them for now.
Q: You’ve been a K-12 teacher and librarian. How does that experience inform your work?
A: I’ve seen how schools bring in new devices with almost no training for teachers on how to integrate them into the classroom or use them effectively. This same pattern is being repeated with generative AI.
Q: What’s the solution?
A: The “muddy middle,” which is somewhere between an outright ban and completely unrestricted use. It will require intensive training that engages both students and teachers with not only how to operate these devices and technology, but also how to reason about their advantages and limitations.
- Listen to Spikes on Eric Schurenberg's Podcast "In Reality"