Robert White, a government and politics teacher at a high school in Lincoln, Neb., was part of a pilot program for the curriculum and has taught it for the last three semesters. He says it works.

“Most students believed what they saw on a news site, any news site,” Mr. White said. “By the end of the semester, I could see a lot of change — they questioned any media source and did fact-checking. I now have students fact-checking me.”

In the last 18 months, another university-level news literacy program, Stony Brook’s Center for News Literacy, has reached out to secondary school staff members and teachers, offering them its summer academy, which runs about four days.

The idea of a journalism school now should be “not only teach the journalists of the future, but to prepare the audience of the future,” Professor Schneider said.

Carmen Amador, the principal of I.S. 303, learned about the Stony Brook news literacy program at a conference and attended the academy when it was still aimed at higher education. Using what she learned there, her school adopted a news literacy curriculum seven years ago.

“Before they started talking about fake news, we were talking about it,” Ms. Amador said. “But after 2016, the teachers became more excited and passionate about it.” The goal, she said, is not only to better understand the news but also to take action through community service and other initiatives.

Students are taught to know the “neighborhood” they’re reading in: is it journalism, entertainment, promotion, raw information or advertising? And an acronym, IMVAIN, is used widely as a cue: Are sources independent, are there multiple sources, do they verify evidence, and are they authoritative, informed and named sources?