Characterizing Security and Privacy Teaching Standards for Schools in the United States

Increasingly, students begin learning aspects of security and privacy during their primary and secondary education (grades K-12 in the United States). Individual U.S. states and some national organizations publish teaching standards-guidance that outlines expectations for what students should learn. However, research has not yet examined what is covered by these standards and whether the topics align with what the broader security and privacy community thinks students should know.

To shed light on these questions, we manually examined 12,201 standards from all U.S. states and eight national organizations. We labeled 3,920 of them as being related to security and privacy, further classifying these into 109 topics ranging from encryption to appropriate online behavior.