Star journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has decided not to accept a chair in the Hussman School of Journalism after the Board of UNC first denied her tenure, then reversed their decision after widespread protests. Hannah-Jones has accepted a journalism chair at historically black Howard University instead, along with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates are joining Howard University’s faculty, school officials announced Tuesday in a major recruiting victory for the private institution in the nation’s capital. It was a simultaneous setback for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to lose Hannah-Jones after a long and remarkably contentious effort to recruit her.

The surprising development came less than a week after trustees for UNC-Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones. Initially, the public university hired her as a professor without the job-protection status. But its board of trustees approved tenure for her on Wednesday, after faculty members and students at Chapel Hill protested that she had been mistreated.

In an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning,” Hannah-Jones said she would not join the UNC faculty. “Very difficult decision,” she told Gayle King. “Not a decision I wanted to make.” The Pulitzer Prize winner said she believed a decision about tenure for her at UNC was delayed because of political opposition to her work and discrimination against her as a Black woman.

Bob Shepherd, resident polymath, has been a teacher, a textbook writer, an assessment developer, and a curriculum writer. I am grateful that he shares his thoughts on this blog on a daily basis.

He recently wrote a post about the Republicans’ obsession with critical race theory, which turns out in most states to be an effort to suppress any discussion of racism, past or present. The war on CRT is an effort to censor teachers and college professors and to make sure that they eliminate any unpleasant or downright disgraceful aspects of American history and society. To teach accurate history, it now seems, is “indoctrination.”

Shepherd writes, in part:

It’s another example of the same phenomenon that occurred a few years back when red state Repugnicans started passing ludicrous legislation against teaching Sharia Law in K-12 pubic schools, even though no U.S. K-12 Public School ever did this, not one. NOT. A. SINGLE. ONE.. The whole business reminds me of when a Flor-uh-duh Mayor issued a proclamation banning the nonexistent medieval bad boy Satan from her town. (Yes, this actually happened.) However, the latest wave of legislation is much, much worse than was that nonsense, for it attempts to ban any and all informed teaching about the history of race in America. It is Thought Control legislation that attempts to dish up for kids a mythologized history that serves the ends of white supremacists, and CRT in K-12 public schools is just the fabricated excuse for this.

BTW, if you are a Repugnican all worked up about CRT, consider this: 

Why this particular obsession with what is obviously a phantasm? 

Why does CRT in K-12, of all things, which doesn’t even exist, get your panties in a wad, but not, say, the facts that if you are black in America you will pay more for the same house, get paid less for the same job, get a stiffer sentence for the same crime, and on and on and on and on? These are examples of SYSTEMS in America that are racist, of Systemic Racism. And we won’t fix these and other similar problems until we face, squarely, our execrable history and the execrable current state of affairs. You might also want to ask yourself, Karen or Chad or whoever you are, why you are all worked up about the same stuff that works up overt, declared White Supremacists and Nazis. You are concerned about the same stuff that matters to ACTUAL NAZIS. Think about that. Think. Think for a freaking change.

In the second part of his two-part essay about the education technology industry, Tom Ultican reviews the highly profitable side of so-called “personalized learning,” where investors profit, not students.

He recognizes that not all EdTech is bad, but goes on to explain how many popular EdTech programs are based on bad pedagogy or are designed to make money.

The pandemic brought a bonanza for online content providers and classroom organizing software. Programs like Google Classroom and Class Dojo which previously seemed superfluous performed a needed service during the crisis. Unfortunately, some of the edtech companies whose businesses spiked were taking advantage of the situation to sell profitable but harmful products based on bad education theory…

As an example:

The Khan Academy is another content provider that saw their traffic soar in 2020. Originally, the academy generated an image of this selfless Silicon Valley guy, Sal Khan, making math education videos and distributing them for free. In 2007, he formed his non-profit but it was not until 2010 that Bill Gates (EIN 56-2618866) and other billionaires began sending him money.

It turns out that Sal Khan is not so selfless. His non-profit is making him wealthy. Khan Academy tax records (EIN 26-1544963) reveal that between 2010 and 2019 his salary totaled $6,009,694 and since 2015 his yearly salary has been more than $800,000. Between 2012-2017, the Gate Foundation gifted the Khan Academy $12,951,598 and the Overdeck Foundation (EIN 26-4377643) has kicked in $2,154,300.

In 2019, Khan Academy took in $92,559,725 of which only $27,629,684 was from contributions. The Academy has turned into a big-revenue generating non-profit.

In October 2020, Khan Academy announced a new joint effort with NWEA called Khan Academy Districts. There sales pitch says “Khan Academy has partnered with NWEA, creators of MAP® Growth™, to empower teachers to differentiate their instruction based on assessment results and meet the needs of all students.”

NWEA is the company that generated a lot of buzz with their covid-learning loss “research.” NWEA sells standardized math and English testing. They take in noisy data (All standardized testing data is noisy and fraught with error) 3-times a school year, do some fancy arithmetic and report out student growth determinations.

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, studied the Ed-Tech industry, which now passes itself as “personalized learning.” He reminds us that Ed-Tech is first and foremost about business and profits, not learning.

He writes:

Not all edtech is negative but it is important to remember that private companies are in it for the money. Giant corporations and private equity firms require return on investment. Improving education comes in second to making profits and everyone in the business knows that the real edtech gold comes from data mining.

Dr Velislava Hillman is a visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In a post on the LSE blog she writes,

“It is hard, perhaps impossible, to go to school and not be registered by a digital technology. Cameras wire the premises; homework is completed using one business’s software application (eg Microsoft Word) that may be embedded onto another business’s platform (shared via Google); emails, bathroom trips, assessments, parental backgrounds  – all feed into digital systems that are owned, managed, used and repurposed by hundreds of thousands of invisible business hands.”

“Edtech companies thrive on digital data.”

Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of Texas, usually focuses his efforts on pushing vouchers. But now he has a new cause: blocking discussions of history at the state history museum. He wants the museum to celebrate the great heroic story of Texas, not to permit challenges to that story. He is an exemplar of Republican “cancel culture.”

Mother Jones reports here on Dan Patrick’s success at censoring a book discussion at the state history museum in Bullock.

On Thursday evening, two Texas writers, Chris Tomlinson and Bryan Burrough, were supposed to give a talk at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin about Forget the Alamo, a new book they co-authored with Jason Stanford. The book, which sets out to dispel the myths of the Republic of Texas’ founding, has already made waves—it makes a persuasive case, for instance, that the state’s much-hyped acquisition of Alamo-related artifacts from the musician Phil Collins was actually just a bill of goods.

Hosting an event with the authors of a buzzy new book about the state’s famous but fraught symbol is what you’d expect a museum such as the Bullock to do. But a few hours before the talk was to begin, Tomlinson announced that the event had been cancelled—in the fullest sense of the word.

As Tomlinson explained it, the museum had been instructed by its board—which includes Texas’ Republican governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker of the house—to pull the plug. “I think we’re being censored,” he told the San Antonio Express-News. On Friday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, confirmed in a tweet that yes, that was exactly what happened.

Dan Patrick has set himself up as the official guardian of Texas history. Forget the historians and the evidence.

Nicholas Tampio, a professor of political science at Fordham University, has noticed a strange silence about Common Core, which was the hottest issue in K-12 just a few years ago. The silence does not mean that the issue has gone away.

Tampio writes:

The Common Core lives, unfortunately

On June 16, Emily Richmond of the Education Writers Association led off a lively social media exchange by tweeting: “Hey, remember the Common Core?”

One special education researcher replied that the Common Core is “implemented now in every classroom in America just under another name.”

Another teacher tweeted: “You mean what NY conveniently rebranded as “Next Generational Learning Standards”? It’s never gone away. 😞”

People also responded with memes of actors saying “Shhh!” and “We do not speak his name.”

Here, I would like to explain how the Common Core is implemented in nearly every classroom in America, and why people rarely say its name anymore.

How federal law locked the Common Core into place

The federal government gives the states money for education, and they tie strings to that money. One of those strings is that states use standards that contain the key elements of the Common Core.

The country’s main federal K-12 education law is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the law authorizes money to help states and districts fund education in high-poverty communities. In 2015, Senator Lamar Alexander explained, “the new law explicitly prohibits Washington from mandating or even incentivizing Common Core.”

This statement does not tell the whole truth. The law does say that secretary of education cannot make states use the Common Core, but the law also requires states to use standards that must resemble the Common Core.

The Every Student Succeeds Act is filled with stipulations about standards. Here is one of them:

Each State shall demonstrate that the challenging State academic standards are aligned with entrance requirements for credit-bearing coursework in the system of public higher education in the State and relevant State career and technical education standards.

State standards must be “challenging,” align with career technical education standards, and align with entrance requirements for credit-bearing coursework in the system of public higher education. If a state has found a way to satisfy these criteria and not use the Common Core or a facsimile of it, then I have not seen it. Texas famously did not adopt the Common Core, but researchers have shown that the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) overlap with the Common Core standards in writing and math.

In my book, Common Core, I argue that the main components of the Common Core are those that support online instruction and testing. The first English Language Arts (ELA) anchor standardrequires students to “cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” If students must use the exact words from the text in their answers, then computers can grade their essays.

To determine if your state uses the Common Core, see if the state standards include the phrase “cite specific textual evidence” or an equivalent. For example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order eliminating the Common Core and adopting the Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards. The firstELA standard is that students must “cite evidence to explain and justify reasoning.” Florida did not get rid of the Common Core.

Four years after the passage of ESSA, Senator Lamar Alexander wrote an essay explaining that his daughter moved from Tennessee to Westchester County, New York. When he asked how his grandchildren were doing, his daughter said: “Common Core here. Common Core there.” I believe that this holds true across the country.

Why won’t people discuss Common Core?

In the spring of 2019, I presented a paper at the American Educational Research Association conference and wanted to see what researchers were saying about the Common Core. Here is what I found.

Many people were presenting research that relied upon the Common Core. One paper discussed how “visual-syntactic text formatting classes found a positive effect on seventh and eighth-grade students’ annual state assessment ELA and writing scores.” Another paper was on how early childhood school attendance affected student performance on later math achievement. These are just two of many papers that used Common Core test scores as the dependent variable to see if an intervention worked.

There were few papers with the words “Common Core” in the title, and of those, the titles often did not indicate a critical stance towards the standards themselves. For example, the paper“Content Literacy and the Common Core” noted that literacy strategies often did not cover the full range of Common Core literacy standards. From what I could tell, few researchers were entering classrooms to research how the Common Core changed instruction from an earlier era.

There seems to be a tacit understanding among education researchers, policymakers, and journalists that the Common Core debate is over. In his new book, Tom Loveless primarily discusses it in the past tense: “Whatever happened to Common Core?” “What was the Common Core debate about?” “Why did Common Core fail?

I believe that there are at least two reasons why people avoid using the words “Common Core” if they can.

First, teachers, administrators, and researchers must go along with the Common Core if they wish to keep their jobs. A teacher once told me their thoughts about the Common Core but then asked me not to give anyone their name because they could be fired for insubordination for criticizing the district’s policies.Professors of education who wish to earn tenure and promotion recognize that journals publish quantitative studies using data from Common Core tests. Superintendents whose job includes generating support for school budgets are not likely to raise public concerns about the quality of the standards that the school is using.

A second reason is that Common Core proponents ridiculed critics. Take, for example, this video—made by the Center for American Progress and Funny or Die—that portrays Common Core critics as tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, negative campaigning works, and many parents don’t want to be made fun of in public by people like Arne Duncan. I have many friends, often mothers, who stopped fighting the Common Core because they kept getting insulted on social media and in their communities.

As a parent, I watched the Common Core rollout harm my oldest son’s kindergarten experience. Based on my research, I believe that the standards lead to an education geared around mind-numbing regurgitating evidence from provided texts. I feel a responsibility to remind people that there are better, more humane ways to educate children.

Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery as a young man. He became a celebrated abolitionist. In 1852, he was invited to speak at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, to commemorate the 4th of July.

This is an early example of critical race theory.

Here is an excerpt of his powerful and eloquent speech:

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory….

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!…

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America.is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery Ñ the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, “It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed.” But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Amercans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their mastcrs? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour….

Today, as most people celebrate the Independence of our country, we think of the men and women who not only established our government but enabled it, prodded it, and compelled it—to live up to its ideals. On July 4, 1776, many Americans were not free; many did not have the right to vote or to own property or to be educated. Many did not have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We have still not lived up to the democratic ideals that the Founding Fathers put on paper. Currently, nearly half the states have enacted or intend to enact laws making it more difficult to vote, which is an attack on the fundamental promise of democracy: one man or woman, one vote.

We have only recently learned how fragile our democracy is. On January 6, 2021, a large mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent the certification of the Presidential election of 2020. According to the U.S. Constitution, this ritual of certifying the results of the election is ceremonial; it is not an occasion to overturn the election results. The electoral votes from the states had been counted and certified. In some states they were recounted. The Trump campaign filed scores of lawsuits to overturn the outcome based on claims of fraud, but every such lawsuit was dismissed for lack of evidence, including two appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though it is dominated 6-3 by conservative Justices. Federal judges appointed by Trump, including three on the High Court, threw out his legal appeals

Despite the resounding defeat of Donald Trump in both the electoral college and the popular vote, Trump insisted that the election had been stolen from him. It came to be known as The Big Lie, repeated on a nearly daily basis.

As January 6 approached, Trump tweeted to his followers and asked them to come to Washington, D.C. on thay. He promised that “it will be wild.” As you know, he addressed thousands of his supporters that day to march to the Capitol and to “fight like hell.”

January 6 was the most shameful day in American history, the only day in which large numbers of Americans attacked the seat of their own government. They were seditionists, they perpetrated a violent insurrection, overrunning the U.S. Capitol, brutally beating law enforcement officers. It is almost equally shameful that members of Trump’s party, with only a few exceptions, have minimized what happened on that day. One member of Congress said it was akin to a normal tourist visit. Another described the violence as “peaceful protest.” Rep. Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership role for acknowledging the seriousness of the insurrection. When asked to create an independent commission to analyze what happened that day, Senate Republicans refused to do so.

The forces of authoritarianism are rising, most notably in China, Russia, Brazil, Hungary, and Myanmar. We need to protect our democracy.

To understand what happened on January 6, please watch this video, created by the New York Times from the cameras of police, insurrectionists, and other sources. You may think you have seen it all. You have not. Watch. Then think hard about what you can do to restore our democratic ideals on this July 4.

Denis Smith, a former official of the Ohio Department of Education, wrote this post in 2017, when the major concern of many was how to teach students to recognize “fake news.”

The villain of the piece is the internet, where anyone can post anything without fact-checking or any kind of filter.

He wrote about a conference on media literacy where Frank W. Baker was the keynote speaker.

Baker was the keynote speaker at the conference, whose title, “Popping the Fake News Bubble: Engaging Students in 21st Century Media and Information Literacy,” reflects the concerns librarians have in teaching students to be critical readers and viewers, consumers of what they are exposed and respond to in the modern world.

While we are now constantly hearing the term fake news, Baker said, the larger problem is a lack of critical thinking on the part of those exposed to media, whether that might be print, advertising, videos, commercial art, and other images that surround us every day. One study, for example, found that, on the average, we are exposed to more than 5,000 visual images daily, many of which have to be examined carefully because of the decisions and choices that accompany media.

The fake news bubble that Baker asked his audience of library/media specialists to address in their work with students is found in the fact that more than half of Americans now receive the majority of their news and information from Facebook and other social media. Never mind that readers of those platforms may not realize that there are usually no filters that provide discernment, and perhaps no editors or gatekeepers at work to mold the accuracy and appearance of media content, concepts, and ideas.

An example of “fake news” content. This meeting never happened. It is a doctored photo.

Yes, the internet is free and unfettered, in stark contrast with more traditional media. But young and old alike need to understand and accept the lack of constraints and therefore develop the critical thinking skills necessary to carefully evaluate media. As a case in point, the “Pizzagate” gunman, who brought an automatic weapon to a Washington restaurant after reading on the internet that it was part of a sex-trafficking ring with ties to Hillary Clinton, was sentenced on June 22 to four years in prison.

With Pizzagate and the manufacture of other infamous fake news products, one thing is certain: The internet is not The New York Times…

It is not an overstatement to say that in the last year, our country has experienced a digital Pearl Harbor, and all of us, particularly our elected officials and community leaders, must acknowledge the crisis we face in expanding our definition of literacy and educating all citizens to develop and expand their critical thinking skills as digital citizens, to use Baker’s term.

In spite of the arduous task ahead in getting these three players to address our national literacy crisis, Baker is optimistic that there is one group already in place to do the work at hand.

“I am excited that today’s librarians are embracing media and visual literacy themselves,” he said. “I believe the more tools and skills they have in their toolboxes, the better they will be equipped to demonstrate and justify the vital importance of their jobs.”

The sad irony, as Smith points out, is that many schools do not have librarians, whose jobs were sacrificed to cut budgets.