Newsela Election Coverage: Fall 2024

The 2024 Elections represent an exciting opportunity for social studies educators to promote civic engagement and connect their instruction to a timely, important event. 

Newsela can support customers during this unique time with content and instructional resources that help students learn more about the electoral process, current events, and key issues relevant to campaigns. 

Our election content will focus on:

  • Voting / Elections / Civics: Expanded civics-oriented collection with a variety of resources on the election process, political parties, voting and voting rights, and media literacy.

  • Current events: News about campaign developments, debates, etc. 

  • Key issues: Content related to topics relevant to the 2024 election.

Included content by Newsela product:

  • Newsela Lite: Non-sensitive breaking news such as announcing the winner of the presidential election.

  • Newsela Essentials: News articles about the election

  • Newsela Social Studies: News articles about the election, primary sources, civics explainers for MS/HS/Elem, speeches

  • Newsela ELA: News articles about the election, civics explainers for elementary students, speeches

How do we maintain political balance?

We maintain a political balance in a few ways. One is that we ensure we do not publish too much content from one particular partner in any given week. We carefully monitor to ensure we are publishing from a diverse array of partners each week.

Another way is that we partner with AdFontes Media to evaluate our content partners. This company evaluates content publishers for bias as well as accuracy and we attempt to work with partners who are closer to neutral, though we do work with some partners who skew slightly left or slightly right at times.

Lastly, we try to have a diverse publication calendar containing stories across different maturity levels from lower elementary to high school, across a variety of subjects and topical categories. We hope this improves the likelihood of students finding something they identify with and enjoy reading.

What can educators do to ensure they provide balanced content using Newsela?

It’s difficult to search content by political leaning on Newsela so if you live in a particularly divided district, we’d highly recommend using our pro/cons and our collection we did with AdFontes Media. These are both available with our ELA license. Searching for Pro/Con articles can yield results for other licenses too.