25 States Have Media Literacy Laws. Most of Their Schools Still Aren’t Teaching It.

Media Literacy
Written By SciComm Summer Camp Team

In 2021, New Jersey became the first state to require media literacy education across all K–12 grades. Both parties voted for it. By January 2026, 24 more states had followed with laws of their own.

Most of their schools still aren't teaching it.

Passing a law and implementing it are different things. That gap between the two leaves most teenagers navigating a media landscape they are unprepared for. Here's what the research shows about how wide that gap actually is — and what parents can do about it.

The Law vs. The Classroom

A 2021 RAND Corporation study surveying public school teachers found that media literacy instruction is unevenly implemented at best, and that obstacles — lack of time, competing priorities — are common across the country. Even within the same state, one teacher might spend ten hours on media literacy over the course of a year while another skips it entirely. Both are technically compliant.

The reasons aren't hard to understand. Most laws don't come with funding. Formal training in media literacy specifically is rare — NAMLE's 2024 Snapshot report found that 77% of media literacy educators report those skills are self-taught, pieced together on their own time without institutional support. That's not a reflection of teachers' commitment — it's a reflection of what happens when states pass laws without funding the professional development to back them up.

Standard guidance from the Office of Educational Development holds that preparing a new lesson takes roughly four hours of preparation for every hour of instruction delivered. The average US teacher gets about four hours and 26 minutes of planning time per week total — against every subject they teach. Teachers in other OECD countries receive an average of five more hours of weekly planning time than their American counterparts. When media literacy isn't a subject with its own period but is instead supposed to be woven through English, science, social studies, and health simultaneously, something always loses.

What “Teaching Media Literacy" Usually Looks Like

When schools do teach media literacy, it tends to look like one of two things: a unit on spotting fake news, or a lesson about checking whether websites are credible.

Neither of those is wrong. But neither is what media literacy actually is.

NAMLE defines media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. That last word — create — is where most school instruction stops short. Consuming critically is one skill. Making content responsibly is another. Most school-based programs never get to the second one.

A teenager who knows how to evaluate a source but has never thought about the choices they make when they post something hasn't learned media literacy. They've learned one part of it.

What Your Teen Probably Isn't Getting

Unless your teen is in a school district that has gone beyond what most laws require, there's a good chance they've never had a structured conversation about:

  • Who creates the content they're consuming and why

  • What choices a creator makes when framing information

  • How to verify a claim before sharing it

  • What responsibility they carry for what they post and share

The gap isn't because these skills aren't important. It's because the infrastructure to teach them consistently doesn't exist yet in most schools. There's no national framework — NASBE notes that states are left piecing together standards from different sources with no unified playbook to work from. The laws are there. The resources, training, and time aren't.

The States Getting Closest — and What Makes Them Different

Four states currently have K–12 media literacy requirements that apply across all grade levels: New Jersey, Delaware, California, and Texas. Of those, California's 2023 law is the most significant development in recent years — it's one of the only laws in the country that explicitly includes funding for curriculum development and teacher professional development. That combination is what most other states' laws have been missing.

It's worth noting what even this progress doesn't guarantee. Media Literacy Now, which publishes the annual policy report tracking state legislation, is explicit that their map tracks legislative action only — not whether schools have actually implemented what the laws require. Having a law is not the same as having a program.

Does your state require media literacy education?

Download the free one-page checklist — state by state, what's required and what's actually happening. →

Not sure where your teen is with these skills? The quiz takes two minutes and points you to the right resources.

Quiz→

If you want your teen to go beyond evaluating media to actually making it — which is where media literacy becomes a permanent skill rather than a lesson — that's what SciComm Summer Camp is designed to do.

Sources

SciComm Summer Camp Team
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