Why Would The State Department of Education Oppose a Law That Would Ensure Media Literacy Is Taught in Schools?
\nBy Frank Baker<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the question all of us are asking after the House Education\/Public Works Committee failed to pass a measure (March 16) that would have created an \u201cadvisory task force\u201d to investigate how media literacy is represented (or not) in the K-12 curriculum.<\/p>\n
Richland Representative Seth Rose introduced the measure earlier this year, and thanks go to Rep. Raye Felder for efforts to get it passed. \u00a0State Department of Education officials testified they were not opposed to creating a task force.\u00a0 But during the first hearing on the measure, members of the committee balked at \u201canother task force.\u201d\u00a0 One committee member testified he didn\u2019t know what \u201cmedia literacy\u201d meant even though it was defined in the measure.<\/p>\n
The State Department of Education (SDE) claims we already teach media literacy. We disagree. I challenge our education officials (and lawmakers) to find references to propaganda, media bias, social media, media literacy, techniques of persuasion, and stereotypes in the K-12 standards. (None of these exist.)<\/p>\n
SDE has evidence that the majority of middle and high school students need additional instruction because they\u2019ve failed to identify bias in a passage in the most recent SC Ready test. \u00a0Teaching this skill should be a priority. But it\u2019s not. That\u2019s troubling.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more troubling is an education department that is aware of these deficiencies (and omissions) and does nothing about it.<\/p>\n
This is not the action of a responsible education agency. If there are no moves to improve \u201cmedia literacy\u201d instruction, our students will continue to be \u201cleft behind.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why Would The State Department of Education Oppose a Law…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29738,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29736\/revisions\/29738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}