How a free curriculum taught kids to be safer online — in 50,000 schools

Common Sense Media built a free, K-12 digital-citizenship curriculum covering privacy, cyberbullying, sexting, online safety and responsible behavior — and it scaled. It's now used in classrooms in all 50 states, across more than 50,000 schools, by over half a million educators. The lessons give kids concrete frameworks (like routines for responding to cruelty online and for being an 'upstander' rather than a bystander), and the program's impact reporting tracks how schools implement it and engage parents. It's the closest thing the US has to a widely-adopted media-literacy backbone.

Hard before-and-after numbers on cyberbullying reduction are still emerging, and the curriculum's reach varies by classroom. But equipping a generation with a shared vocabulary for online dilemmas — at no cost to schools — is a meaningful, scalable intervention.

• Ask whether your child's school uses a digital-citizenship curriculum, and which one.
• Reinforce the same frameworks at home so school and family speak the same language.
• Use the free family resources to keep conversations going outside class.

• Explore Common Sense's digital-citizenship curriculum and family materials.
• Bring it to teachers or your PTA if your school lacks a structured program.
• Read the impact report to see how schools are implementing it.

• Common Sense — digital citizenship curriculum impact report (2024 PDF) commonsensemedia.org ↗
• Common Sense Education — the digital citizenship curriculum commonsense.org ↗
• Common Sense — teaching digital citizenship has a real impact commonsensemedia.org ↗

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