What Does “86” Mean?

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
1

The U.S. Department of Justice has gotten an indictment against James Comey, former FBI Director, because Comey posted a photo of seashells that dumisplayed the number “8647.”

Trump is angry at Comey because he authorized the FBI investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election to favor Trump. In actuality, he should be thanking Comey, because his decision to reopen the FBI review of her emails only 10 days before the 2016 election hurt her and helped Trump win.

FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency had spent “9, 10, 11 months” determining that the seashell message threatened the president’s life. (One reaction in Twitter was: “Let Savannah Guthrie find her own mother,” another showed Patel with a huge conch shell to his ear and was labeled “Law & Order: Special Seashell Victims Unit.)

I looked up 86 in various dictionaries and none of them said that it referred to murder.

In Wikipedia, the term 86 means:

Eighty-six or 86 is American English slang, originating in the hospitality industry, especially a food or drinks establishment, meaning that an item is no longer available, or that a person or people is not welcome on the premises. Its etymology is unknown, but it seems to have been coined in the 1920s or 1930s.

I asked ChatGPT about the meaning of 86, and it responded:

“86” is American slang with a few related meanings, all built around the idea of getting rid of something:

1) In restaurants and bars (most common origin)

  • “We’re 86 on the salmon” → the salmon is sold out / unavailable
  • “86 that order” → cancel it

2) About people

  • “He got 86’d from the bar” → he was kicked out / banned

3) More generally

  • “Let’s 86 that idea” → discard or reject it

Where it comes from (uncertain)
There’s no single confirmed origin, but popular theories include:

  • Old diner slang codes in the early 20th century
  • Prohibition-era bars using numbers to signal “no more” or “remove someone”
  • A reference to being “86 miles out” (i.e., gone)

The exact source is debated, but the meaning—remove, reject, or run out of—is consistent across uses.

A Substack blog blog titled “Home of the Brave” says that Trump doesn’t know what “86” means. It is not associated with murder or death.”

This week the Department of Justice indicted James Comey for a social media post of seashells spelling out “8647.” That put the term “86”—which in restaurant industry parlance means striking or removing something from the menu—in the spotlight.

From the Oval Office, here’s what Trump had to say: “If anybody knows anything about crime, they know ‘86.’ You know what 86 [is]? It’s a mob term for ‘kill them.’ You ever see the movies?”

We decided to take the president up on his suggestion, and checked “the movies” for 86 references:

  • In The Candidate (1972), Robert Redford is told to “86 the sideburns.”
  • In The Grace Card (2010), Michael Joiner plays a cop who is so annoyed by his partner’s singing that he asks “can we 86 it, please?”
  • In Make It Happen (2008), dancer Tessa Thompson says she’ll “just 86 the combo” in her routine.
  • In Chef (2014), Jon Favreau tells his fellow cooks that an item on the menu is going to be “86”-ed.
  • In a 2017 episode of the TV show Shameless, Emmy Rossum tells Richard Flood to “86” an ugly pocket door.

You get the idea. Trump is almost certainly pretending he thinks the seashells post was a threat on his life because he wants Comey prosecuted. Citing “the movies” as his support is laughable on its face.

We have a handful of movies to recommend if Trump wants to learn the true meaning of “86”. He could have screened them in the White House Family Theater if he hadn’t already demolished it.

Home of the Brave exists to show Americans the real-world consequences of this administration’s policies, and to highlight what bravery looks like in defense of American democracy.

Categories Trump

Worshipping at the Feet of The Great Donald

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
0

Rick Wilson wrote this brilliant post on his blog.

He nailed a question that has worried me. I had thought it was odd that the same Christian nationalists who worship Trump insist on posting the Ten Commamdments in every classroom. Have they ever read those Ten Commandments, any version of them? The first commandment is to recognize God as the only Lord and to put no other god before the real one. (“I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other god before me.”) No worshipping false gods, idols, or golden calves.

Nonetheless, these same supposedly devout “Christians” worship Trump and obey his every command. They ignore his many breaches of the Ten Commandments as well as the Constitution because he is their god.

Trump has a long and well-documented history as a con man with multiple bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits. Creating his MAGA cult to worship him, to believe his empty promises, is the greatest con of all. And the most profitable! Since he was inaugurated, he and his sons have grown richer by billions of dollars. Not millions. Billions.

Rick Wilson, former Republican insider, offers “A Reading from the Book of Donald.”

Donald 3:28-34

  1. And it came to pass in the year of the Tariff, whilst war raged across the lands of Elam, that the people of all the tribes of MAGA gathered upon the fairway on the Plain of Doral; and the priests came down from among them, both evangelical and influencers, with oil, with incense, and with selfie sticks and cameras.
  2. And they said unto the multitude, “Bring forth thy pelf and thy gold, clicking here, patriots, that we may overlay it; for behold, we have made thee a god of fourteen cubits, that the great orange LORD may know whom thou servest.”
  3. “Thou shalt make unto thyself a graven image; yea, the taller the better, and the gilding shall be thick, and the thinness of the frame shall show the orange LORD’s svelte and manly figure to best advantage.”
  4. And they said to the tribes of MAGA, “Thou shalt bow down before it, and serve it, and thou shalt photograph thyself beside it; for the patron thy god is a jealous patron, and exceedingly photogenic.”
  5. “As for the commandment of old which said ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ behold, we have CAST DOWN the Hebrew God; and VERILY we worship the One Orange God at Temple of the Reality Star, for it pleases the Donald, and the Donald’s pleasure is the law.”
  6. And the priests laid their hands upon the statue, and pronounced it good; and the people cried, ‘This is thy God, O MAGA, who delivered the billionaires from taxes, who clothed you in the red hats sacred to his worship, who didst provide you with the sacred crypto of his name, and who gave unto you his Tweets.”
  7. And Moses, hearing of it, came down from the mount in haste, with tablets in his hand; but the Secret Service would not admit him at the gate, for his name was not on the list and he had not offered either his donations or his worship.
Categories Religion, Trump

Why Have Test Scores Stagnated?

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
10

The New York Times published an article yesterday about the fall and stagnation of scores in reading and math in the U.S. it was written by Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh. The declines are no longer the fault of the pandemic. They cut across income, racial, and geographic divides.

The link above goes to s gift article, so please open and review the graphs and finish the article.

The authors attribute the stagnation to two likely phenomena: 1) easing the testing-and-accountability pressure of the NCLB-Race to the Top era; and 2) the ubiquity of Ed-tech in the schools.

I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of NCLB-RTTT pressures. Sure, they increased pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education.

Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure.

Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Another way of putting it: “the more important a metric is in social decision making, the more likely it is to be manipulated.”

Lest we forget: NCLB brought us cheating on an industrial scale. Rigging the system to improve scores. Narrowing the curriculum, with schools making time for test prep by dropping the arts, recess, physical education, and allotting less time for subjects that were not tested, such as civics, history, foreign languages, and science. Fewer teachers assigned whole books, but instead focused on short passages, the kind that appear on standardized tests.

The tests themselves are flawed. The scoring is flawed. The underlying assumption that every question has a right answer and only one right answer is bad teaching.

I have written long essays and chapters in books about how standardized testing is toxic to the principles of good education. Guessing “the right answer” does not promote critical thinking, which might lead a student to pick a different answer or two right answers. As I have written elsewhere, asking the right question matters more than guessing the right answer.

Testing experts like Daniel Koretz have demonstrated their limitations. Todd Farley, in “Making the Grades,” showed how shabbily the tests are scored.

As the Times‘ article points out, other countries have experienced the same score decline and stagnation, even without NCLB and RTTT.

For God’s sake and for our children’s sake, let us not return to the horrid era of test and punish. Let it go. Students may get bigger test scores under pressure, but they may be less interested in learning.

Many European nations have concluded, as I showed in several articles posted here last week, that Ed-tech in the classroom has dampened students’ attention, persistence, and interest in learning. Sweden and Norway are pulling the plugs. Norway never fell for the tech revolution. See the Sweden article here. See the Norway post here.

If the testing industry and the heroes of yesteryear’s failed reforms want another go at killing love of learning, the parents of America will have to organize and stop them with massive opt outs. Again.

***********************

The Times’ story begins like this;

Something troubling is happening in U.S. education.

Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.

Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides….

The new data provides the first national comparison of school districts through 2025, and offers a detailed picture of how individual school districts have performed over time. It underscores that many districts have experienced a long-term slump in student achievement, not just a blip during the pandemic.

From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024.

Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly. The new data shows that scores inched upward in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground, researchers said….

The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students….

Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues.

Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.

The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than prepandemic.

In one in three school districts in the United States, students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015…

Some experts believe that the end of No Child Left Behind, the contentious school accountability law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, explains some of the recent test score declines.

The law set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties. It coincided with a period of rising test scores, especially in math, though reading scores improved more modestly. Low-performing students saw the biggest gains.

The law, though, was deeply unpopular with many educators and parents. Critics said it put an outsize focus on testing, pushing schools to teach to the test and spend less time on other important subjects, like the arts or social studies. In 2015, Congress replaced it, and many states dialed back on requirements. 

Like many who have studied the law, Brian A. Jacob, professor of education policy at the University of Michigan, showed that it increased test scores but had problematic elements.

“It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement,” he said. “There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

Beyond the policy specifics, its passage reflected a nationwide, bipartisan push to improve education, some experts said, that the country seems to have lost in its absence.

Yet some other countries have seen similar declines in scores, suggesting additional factors may be at play.

Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school.

Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online “almost constantly,” compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center. Virtually all schools give children laptops or tablets in class, as early as kindergarten.

Few rigorous studies have teased out the role of devices in academic outcomes. Yet educators say there’s no question that swiping has decreased students’ focus and persistence, and time on devices has displaced time spent reading or studying. Far more teenagers — nearly one in three — now say they “never or hardly ever” read for fun.

In turn, schools expect less from students, assigning fewer whole books and simplifying the curriculum, said Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s no other way, except volume, in order to become a really proficient, fluent, avid reader,” she said.

Radnor Township, an affluent district outside Philadelphia, is one of the highest scoring in Pennsylvania. Teachers still expect students to read full books, including novels like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The vast majority of students are proficient readers. Still, fewer score at an advanced level on state tests — under 40 percent last year, down from 51 percent in 2015.

Categories Education Reform

Trump Sued IRS for $10 Billion. How Much Will He Pay Himself?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
7

Never in U.S. history has a President so brazenly enriched himself while serving in office. Trump’s family makes business deals with countries that pay enormous profits. Trump sells Trump-branded merchandise at every opportunity. Meme coins, crypto, invitations to dine with him for a hefty price. The money-making opportunities are abundant. Since the start of his second term, his net worth has increased by billions.

But the biggest grift of all is not yet settled. Trump sued the Treasury Department and the IRS for $10 billion for leaking data about his income taxes, an act done by a contractor who was punished with a five-year jail sentence.

The irony is that every president since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released their tax returns, to demonstrate that they have no financial conflicts of interest and would not profit by serving as president. So, Trump is suing the IRS for doing what he should have done voluntarily but refused to do. He ran three times without releasing his tax returns.

By suing the IRS, he is in effect suing himself. Scott Bessent, appointed by Trump and serving at his pleasure, is on the other side of the table. What will he give his boss?

The plot thickens as the Justice Department, also under Trump’s thumb and eager to please him, is trying to reach a settlement in the case of Trump V. the Treasury Department/IRS controlled by Trump.

Trump sued in southern Florida, expecting or hoping to get a judge appointed by him, but must have been stunned when the judge turned out to be Obama appointee. This creates an incentive to settle the case before it goes to the judge.

Of all Trump’s many lawsuits, this may be the most sickening because it is the most corrupt and self-dealing.

Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer reported in The New York Times:

The Justice Department is holding internal discussions about settling President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Servicein the coming days, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, a move that could involve the government directly providing taxpayer funds or another public benefit to the president.

Whether to settle the suit and on what terms remains up in the air. One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.

In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Given that Mr. Trump oversees the I.R.S., the agency that he is suing, the judge in the case has taken a series of novel legal steps to probe whether there is a genuine controversy between the Justice Department and Mr. Trump. For a lawsuit to be valid, the two parties must actually be on opposite sides, otherwise the judge can throw out the case. The judge has ordered Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers — along with the Justice Department, which represents the I.R.S. in federal court — to submit briefs by May 20 explaining whether they are in conflict with one another.

White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline, according to the people.

Mr. Trump has long maintained that the federal government was weaponized against him by political opponents, and he has spent much of his second term seeking retribution against, and sometimes compensation from, those he holds responsible. But depending on its terms, a settlement with the I.R.S. could be among Mr. Trump’s most brazen efforts to bend the government to his personal will — an agenda often carried out through the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump and his family have repeatedly disregarded Washington’s ethical guardrails aimed at preventing government officials from profiting from public office, including by pushing for more than $200 million in a separate administrative case with the Justice Department. But a settlement payment even a fraction of the size of Mr. Trump’s requested $10 billion could be much larger than his other attempts at private gain, potentially doubling his net worth.

The Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred questions to Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the case, a spokesman for whom said, “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

In a previous filing in the case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said they were in discussions with unidentified Justice Department attorneys “designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.” A government attorney has yet to make an appearance in the case.

A settlement in the coming days would fly in the face of efforts by the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, an appointee of President Barack Obama in the Southern District of Florida, to try and manage the conflict of interest in the case. Not only has she requested briefings from Mr. Trump’s lawyers and the government by next week, she has appointed a group of six well-respected lawyers not otherwise involved in the case to provide her with their views on whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is legitimate.

If a settlement is reached before Judge Williams has a chance to make a decision about whether the underlying lawsuit is valid, it could frustrate her, though legal experts say that her authority beyond that would be limited.

She would not likely be able to prevent Mr. Trump from simply withdrawing the suit and coming to a private agreement with the federal government. Even if the judge were to ultimately find that the settlement was collusive or reached in bad faith, she would likely be hamstrung in any effort to stop money or other benefits from changing hands.

Former government lawyers and experts see a clear defense to Mr. Trump’s suit, and do not see it as one the Justice Department would typically settle on its merits. A group of former I.R.S. and Justice Department officials filed an amicus brief in the case arguing, among other things, that Mr. Trump filed the suit too late and that his request for at least $10 billion was far too large.

Charles Littlejohn, the former I.R.S. contractor sentenced to five years in prison for the leak, provided tax return information about thousands of other wealthy Americans to ProPublica. Some of those people have also sued the I.R.S., and the Justice Department has defended those suits, in part by arguing that the government can’t be held liable for the actions of a contractor.

One of those suits against the I.R.S., from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, was settled in 2024, but the government did not pay Mr. Griffin any damages. Instead, the I.R.S. made a public apology for the leak.

It is unclear or how much money Mr. Trump could receive in a settlement, or if he will be paid at all.

But protection from I.R.S. audits could prove quite valuable. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president and vice president’s annual tax returns. The series of Times articles at the center of Mr. Trump’s suit, published in 2020, showed that he had paid little or no income tax for years. In 2024, the Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

At the same time, federal law prohibits the president from ordering the start or conclusion of an I.R.S. audit of a specific taxpayer.

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: Reasons for Optimism about U.S. Politics!

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
7

This a great article that will uplift your spirits!

Jennifer Rubin is a journalist and lawyer who was hired by The Washington Post to be its conservative columnist. But Trump radicalized her, and she became a leading voice for liberal policies. After Jeff Bezos decided to placate and woo Trump, she resigned her job and started a new and wildly popular blog called “The Contrarian,” where she and other brilliant writers gathered to critique the madness of MAGA.

She recently posted an optimistic analysis of American politics. Despite the gerrymandering, despite horrible court decisions, Democrats are in a great position to wash the MAGA stain out of the nation’s government.

It’s the most optimistic piece I’ve read in a long while, and I think you will enjoy it too.

Rubin writes:

In a span of less than two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court (contravening the text and intent of the post-Civil War amendments and decades of court precedent) and the Virginia State Supreme Court (overturning the will of Virginia voters and inventing a new definition of “election”) have bulldozed through the electoral landscape to slant the 2026 midterm playing field in Republicans’ favor.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the U.S. Supreme Court demolished 60 years of progress in voting rights, robbed Black and Hispanic communities of the power to elect representatives of their own choosing, and aimed to decimate the ranks of non-white U.S. House members, state legislators, and local officials. This is nothing short of an attempt to reimpose white supremacy.

(MicroStockHub/iStock)

Voting rights legal guru Rick Hasen wrote:

This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation…. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters.

As infuriating, partisan, and legally unsound as these rulings are, they are not the final word on either the midterms or the future of our multi-racial democracy.

The Midterms

Even with the loss in Virginia, Democrats’ five-seat pick up in California should more than counteract the original Texas re-redistricting (where two of the five seats Republicans sought to steal may well go to Democrats). And despite the Virginia decision, Democrats may still pick up one to two more seats under Virginia’s old map. The net pickup for Republicans currently is less than ten before Democrats pursue their own redistricting in New York, Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland.

However, even with the advantage of, say, a dozen rigged seats, Republicans are unlikely to keep the House majority. Since 2024, Democrats have swung the electorate substantially in their direction, over-performing in comparison to Kamala Harris in 193 of 226 state legislative races, by 20 points in some cases. On average, Democrats are doing more than 10 points better than they did in 2024. (Brookings’ William A. Galston wrote: “In the six special elections for the House conducted in 2025-2026, the swing toward Democratic candidates averaged about 15 points, while the swing toward Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia averaged 14 points.”)

More than 20 Republican House seats were won by less than 10 points in 2024; 43 Republicans won by less than 15%. Given the electoral shift, Democrats’ list of targeted seats expands each week.

The New York Times reported that gerrymandering “tells only part of the story” about the midterms. While “Democrats could end up losing at least half a dozen safe seats, and possibly more,” depending on new maps drawn in Southern states, Republicans face gale-force “headwinds” thanks to Donald Trump’s atrocious approval numbers, his reviled Iran war, soaring gas and other consumer prices, snatching away healthcare coverage from millions, disaffection of Hispanic voters, and rampant corruption.

In short, gerrymandering, however outrageous, will not be enough to save Republicans if Democrats generate huge turnout, especially among those voters enraged that they have been stripped of voting power. (As Hungary demonstrated, a determined opposition can overcome a raft of unfair impediments imposed by a corrupt, unpopular regime.)

Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republicans know that the MAGA cult has no message — which is why MAGA lawmakers and courts must rig the election to cement white supremacy. That’s all they’ve got.

Democrats have their targets

The enormity of reversing 60 years of progress on voting rights necessitates a new era of intense organizing and public education — a new civil right movement to counter MAGA’s court-imposed Jim Crow. That effort kicks off with a grassroots National Day of Action on Saturday, May 16, in Alabama. Organizers declared, “The dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a reminder that we have unfinished business. The fight is ours and we are going to finish it.” Scores of democracy groups, faith-based organizations, and civil rights organizations will rally to oppose Jim Crow redistricting and to support multi-racial democracy.

The goal: Democrats must win, and win big, in 2026 and 2028. Senate seats, governorships, and other statewide offices cannot be gerrymandered. A massive registration and turnout-the-vote operation must expand deep into Republican areas, appealing to disgruntled independents and Republicans while firing up the base. Democrats will need a broad, inclusive electoral coalition to pursue bold reform. As former attorney general Eric Holder likes to say, progressives “need to be comfortable with acquiring power and using power.”

What then? If Democrats come out of the 2028 election with House and Senate majorities, and the presidency, they will have all the motivation and tools required to reverse the slide into Jim Crow, beginning with substantial reform of the discredited Supreme Court. The MAGA justices’ willful misreading of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution to concoct a “color blind” interpretation of voting rights (coupled with their monstrous expansion of executive power and abuse of the emergency docket) should unify democracy defenders on the urgency of Supreme Court reform through court expansion, term limits, revised appellate jurisdiction, and ethics reform.

Election law guru Rick Hasen argued:

The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy. If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches, it will be incumbent on them not only to write new voting legislation protecting minority voters and all voters in the ability to participate fairly in elections that reflect the will of all the people. They will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself.

With the election of aggressive Senate Democrats running in 2026 and 2028, Democrats should have little trouble carving out a filibuster exception, especially if they win by large margins that affirm voters’ rejection of MAGA assault on pluralistic democracy.

In addition to reforming the MAGA Supreme Court, a myriad of solid proposals for undoing the damage wrought by Callais include: state voting rights’ protections, a federal statute that requires nonpartisan redistricting, proportional representation, and a constitutional amendmentguaranteeing the right to vote. Democrats should pursue an “all of the above” approach, not merely to regain but to expand diverse voters’ participation and power.

Though the tools to sustain multi-racial democracy may be different from those employed in the 1960s, Madeleine Greenberg of the Campaign Legal Center reminded us: “Every generation has faced attempts to restrict access to the ballot box, and every generation has pushed back.” If Democrats win elections decisively and fully exercise the power they obtain, they can fix what MAGA white supremacists have broken. Only then can we fulfill the promise of pluralistic democracy.

The midterm elections of 2026 are approaching. Start working now to reclaim our democracy! Our time is now.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, History, Justice, Trump

Jan Resseger: Rebuffing the Attacks on Teachers and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
4

Jan Resseger is a careful researcher in Ohio who tracks education issues with careful attention to facts, details, and context. In this post, she notes that public schools have become the targets of ideologues in state legislatures and even the U.S. Department of Education. All too often, politicians use the public schools as a punching bag, but know nothing of their work or their accomplishments. werethe fsmiliar with the work and the accomplishments of teachers, she believes, state and federal officials would thank teachers instead disparaging them.

In recent local elections, voters in nearly 2/3 of school districts turned down relatively small property tax increases to fund the schools, usually repairs and physical upgrades. Legislators said this proved that voters are not happy with public schools, but Jan believes the election results reflect the squeeze of inflation and affordability caused by Trump’s policies and by the state’s failure to fund public schools adequately as it continues to expand charters and vouchers. Ohio has a Republican supermajority in both houses of its legislature, and they are eagerly funding charters and vouchers despite disappointing results.

As Jan writes, if the critics were familiar with the daily work of teachers, they would be champions of public schools, not critics.

She writes:

Attacks on the nation’s public schools fill the news. After last week’s May primary election in Ohio, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee reportedly blamed public schools for a statewide property tax revolt: “(T)hrowing money at schools stuck in an old way of thinking won’t solve any problems.”

And at the federal level at the end of April, the U.S. Department of Education, by amending federal guidance, stopped defining public school teachers and administrators as professionals by setting formal regulations that will mean graduate students in education cannot borrow as much money to pay for graduate school as others the Trump administration defines as professionals.  Education Week’s Evie Blad reports that a new federal regulation finalized by the U.S. Department of Education would “exclude education from a list of  ‘professional’ graduate degrees subjected to higher loan limits… The final rule lists the following graduate degrees as ‘professional’: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology, and clinical psychology.”  The new rule will make it harder for educators to afford graduate school by setting “new limits on federal student loans” for teachers and school administrators seeking advanced degrees to enhance their content knowledge and meet requirements for licensure.

The Department of Education must publish in the Federal Register new rules that are being proposed, and receive public comments prior to making the new rules final.  In the case of redefining graduate programs in education as non-professional, there was considerable pushback from the public. Secretary McMahon’s department ignored the comments.  For K-12 Dive, Anna Merod and Ben Unglesbee report: “Commenters told the department that impacted degree programs include master of arts in teaching, master of education, education specialist, master of library sciences, and doctor of education… The department’s final rule said the agency received many public comments calling for including education as a professional degree or to otherwise allow higher borrowing levels for students pursuing advanced education degrees.  In their arguments, commenters cited teacher shortages and the importance of graduate programs for licensure advancement… Additionally commenters noted that career changers who want to enter the profession pursue master’s degrees in education for certification, especially in high-need areas.”

Many of us value public education, but increasingly we take these institutions for granted. While schools are essential to our neighborhoods, our communities and our children, most of us have not been inside a school for years due to lockdowns during our society’s epidemic of gun violence. Constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black recently shared some statistics which ought to remind us why public schools are so essential and at the same time so vulnerable to politics: “(A)s the largest government institution in the United States, public education is an obvious potential target of those aiming to undermine faith in government institutions. Public education is twice the size of the entire federal government. More important, it represents the most extensive and persistent relationship that citizens ever have with government. Public schools educate roughly ninety percent of Americans for more than a decade during their formative years.”

The Attack on Public Schools

The late Mike Rose, who devoted his long career at UCLA to preparing future members of the teaching profession, worried about what has, since the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, been a political attack on the nation’s public schools: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here.  Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination…”   (Why School? 2014 edition, pp 203-204)

Rose responded with a three year series of visits across the United States to the classrooms of excellent teachers identified by academics, by their peers, and by school district leaders. In the book which grew out of his school visits, Possible Lives, Rose described teachers at work and reflected on what school teachers do: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost.  It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)

What do teachers do?

Here instead, however, is what those three years showed Rose about school teachers and the complexity of their work: “To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.”  (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)

In a comprehensive 2014 summary, Rose defines what teachers do:  “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

Reacquainting ourselves with Mike Rose’s thinking is one way for us all to consider the complexity of public schools as institutions and the challenges faced by the professionals who spend six or seven hours every day working with our children.  I fear that few of the state legislators and federal officials who deride teachers, who insult teachers by denying their professional status, and who chronically underfund public schools have recently spent much time visiting a public school.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ohio, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching, Teaching, Tennessee

ProPublica: When Parents Refuse Essential Vitamin K Shot, Babies May Die

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
0

Duaa Eldeib, health reporter for ProPublica, reports that parents who refuse the vitamin K shot normally administered to babies, are putting their infants’ lives at risk. Influenced by the anti-vaccine rhetoric that started during the pandemic, some parents no longer trust the standard of care developed and validated over decades by scientists and doctors.

How many children will RFK Jr. kill before he is either fired for incompetence or has four full years to discredit necessary medical care?

She writes:

They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.

Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.

Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy’s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.

None of it was enough.

At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.

Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.

In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.

Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families’ fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.

Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough.

The vitamin K shot is one of the three main interventions, along with the hepatitis B vaccine and an antibiotic ointment in the eyes, that newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital. Leading American institutions and the World Health Organization recommend that newborns get the shot.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been highly effective at fighting a virus that can lead to lifelong infections and liver cancer. A federal judge in March temporarily blocked the revised childhood vaccination schedule that included that recommendation. Some families are also rejecting the eye ointment.

Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.

“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.

“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”

An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions but in an email blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden for the rise in parents rejecting vitamin K shots. “Vitamin K at birth,” the spokesperson added, “remains the standard of care.”

Meanwhile, families continue to be inundated with advice from self-proclaimed experts using medical terms incorrectly and misunderstanding science to convince parents that getting the shot could put their newborns at risk of grave harm.

Nearly a century’s worth of research and medical advancements shows the opposite to be true.

Please open the link to finish trading.

Categories Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Lies, Medicine

Trump Lies About Vaccines and Babies

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
10

Trump was interviewed and asked his view of vaccines. He responded with a barrage of lies about how many vaccines babies get and the dangers of them. He claimed that babies get 80 or more vaccines, which is wrong. His ignorance could be deadly. His comments could discourage parents from getting their babies vaccinated, which will expose them to risky diseases.

Trump defended Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crackpot views about vaccines and their relationship to autism.

Kelby Vera of The Huffington Post reported:

President Donald Trump made an outlandish claim about early childhood vaccine recommendations, lamenting that “beautiful little babies” were given a “vat … of stuff pumped into their bodies.”

In an interview with journalist Sharyl Attkissonon the Sunday episode of her show “Full Measure,” Trump defended Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying, “People love him.”

Trump was then asked whether there should be a commission to scrutinize vaccine safety, as Kennedy has long advocated.

“I believe in vaccines, but I don’t believe that, you know, you have to have a mandate for all of them,” Trump said.

Then, he falsely claimed that children were required to receive more than 80  vaccines and argued for reducing the number of immunizations.

“I look at these beautiful little babies, and they get a vat, like a big glass, of stuff pumped into their bodies,” Trump said. “And I think it’s a very negative thing to do.”

As of early 2026, the CDC recommends, rather than mandates, that children under 10 be inoculated against 11 conditions, down from a previous recommendation of 17.

Trump also claimed that paring back the childhood vaccine schedule would lead to a “better result with the autism.”

Despite extensive scientific evidence debunking a link between childhood vaccines and autism spectrum disorder, Kennedy has continued to push the theory. Last year, he personally directed the CDC to change its website to say that there was “not an evidence-based claim” to discredit the connection between vaccines and an autism diagnosis and that studies showing the contrary had been “ignored by health authorities.”

“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made’ is just a lie,” Kennedy told The New York Times in 2025.

Open the link to view the video.

Categories Fake News, Health, Ignorance, Lies, Medicine, Trump

Lone Democratic Member of FCC Warns ABC About Plans to “Censor and Control” Media

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
1

Anna Gomez, the sole Democratic member of the board of the Federal Comminications Commission (FCC) took the unusual step of writing a letter to the CEO of ABC to warn him about the federal government’s goal of censoring the media. Early on in the second Trump administration, Trump sued ABC because one of its hosts, George Stephanopolous, asked Trump about “rape” charges in the E. Jean Carroll case, when Trump denied the charge and even denied the charge of defaming her, of which he was convicted. ABC paid Trump $16 million to persuade him to drop the lawsuit.

But the payoff did not buy peace. The FCC has now opened an investigation of ABC because of its talk show “The View,” which it accuses of bias.

The Wall Street Journal has the story:

ABC has been a victim of a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” by the Trump administration, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez told Josh D’Amaro, chief executive of Disney , the network’s parent company.

The FCC under Republican Chairman Brendan Carr has been weaponized to pressure “a free and independent press and all media into submission,” Gomez wrote in a letter sent to D’Amaro on Monday and viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The lone Democratic commissioner, Gomez has been an outspoken critic of many of Carr’s actions, which she has alleged are aimed at pressuring broadcasters for political purposes. 

The letter to D’Amaro comes in the wake of several investigations into Disney and ABC initiated by Carr’s FCC, including whether the talk show “The View” should continue to be granted certain exemptions as a news program…

Gomez told D’Amaro that these investigations and incidents, along with an FCC decision to reinstate a complaint into ABC’s moderating of a 2024 debate between then-candidate Donald Trump and opponent Kamala Harris, are “not a series of coincidental regulatory actions….”

The FCC is also investigating whether Disney has engaged in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that run afoul of the agency’s equal-employment-opportunity rules….

Gomez said the administration’s attacks on the network began in earnest with a defamation lawsuit against the network and “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos that ABC settled for $16 million, including legal fees.

“That settlement did not buy you peace,” Gomez wrote, adding “you cannot buy this Administration’s favor. For the right price, you can only borrow it. And the price always goes up.”

In her letter, Gomez pledged to use “every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”

While Gomez is a frequent critic of Carr, it is highly unusual for a government regulator to tell a company under investigation that the probe is without merit.

The investigations, Gomez said, are unlikely to succeed but that is not the point.

“The threat is the point. As sitting Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently reminded us by invoking Justice Thurgood Marshall: ‘The value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangs, not that it drops,’” she wrote.

Categories Censorship, Extremism, Media

John Merrow: AI Didn’t Kill Writing. The Testing Regime is the Culprit!

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
5

John Merrow was the education correspondent for the PBS Newshour for many years. Some people never forgave him for his many episodes lionizing Michelle Rhee. I forgave him when he filmed a final episode thoroughly exposing her cruel methods and her indifference to allegations of cheating.

John’s latest post seeks to correct the record, with reference to Dana Goldstein’s article in The New York Times blaming AI (artificial intelligence) for killing the teaching of writing.

No, says John, AI didn’t do it. Our hyper-focus on standardized testing and standardized writing and standardized thinking did it.

He writes:

This week the New York Times turned over a significant portion of its front page to a long piece headlined “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (And Revived It).”

In the piece, the usually reliable Dana Goldstein puts forth sweeping generalizations based on what about 400 teachers volunteered. This, in a nation with nearly 4 million public school teachers and another 1.5 million college faculty! Granted, most of these 5.5 million teachers probably aren’t teaching writing, but relying on self-selected sources seems dubious, especially for the front page. What we learn is that a few creative and dedicated teachers, frustrated by their students’ reliance on A.I., are having the kids write in class, on paper, with pens or pencils. That’s not really news, although Goldstein, a very good writer, brings their stories to life…and may make you wish you could be in their classes.

More than a year earlier Ben Cohen reported about the dramatic rise in the sale of ‘blue books’ on college campuses: Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.

Both of these news reports hang on the same premise: Student writing is dead, and A.I. is the killer. I think that’s flat out false. Our obsession with test scores and our prioritizing quantity over quality are the culprits. Most education systems stopped trying to teach writing back when Artificial Intelligence was the stuff of science fiction, unfortunately. Playing up to politicians, the education bureaucrats (who generally don’t trust teachers) decided to ‘raise standards,’ which to them meant having students write more papers and read more books and plays. Any suggestion that writing one outstanding paper would be better than six or a dozen so-so papers fell on deaf ears.

And because writing skills can’t be tested by a machine, why bother? Since we don’t trust teachers, it would be foolish to rely on their evaluation of their students’ writing skills.

Happily, I know in my bones that lots of teachers have not given up. A quick Google search turns up a treasure trove of ideas for improving student writing, starting in the elementary years. Writing thank you notes, keeping a journal, and so on. Here’s one I think you will enjoy (and might want to share with teachers in your world).

It’s not semantics to assert that the goal is to develop writers, not “teach writing.” That’s an important distinction.

So what can teachers who want to develop writers in their classes do in 2026? First of all, take a deep breath because we’ve been through this before–back when the internet emerged. Soon some students discovered that they could download papers and submit them as their own. Next came profit-making companies offering papers written to order. While small-minded bureaucrats thought they could win that struggle by spending millions on technology that supposedly could scan papers and detect plagiarism, thoughtful teachers won that struggle by 1) reducing the number of papers assigned, and 2 )working with individual students as they developed their ideas and wrote drafts. It’s harder to cheat when the teacher is overseeing the process and when kids are writing about something they genuinely care about.

What’s called for now is emulating what my high school English teacher, William Sullivan, did nearly 70 years ago. Two or three times every week he would tell us to clear our desks of everything except for a single sheet of paper and a pencil. What followed was what he called a “2-8-2,” meaning that we had two minutes to think–no writing allowed–followed by eight minutes to write, and then two more minutes to read what we had written and correct any errors. He would put our writing assignment on the blackboard. Sometimes we would have to include a certain sentence, such as “I wish I had missed that train.” Or “I still wish I hadn’t missed that flight.”

Even today I still remember one particular assignment: “Turn out the light; I don’t want to go home in the dark,” which Mr. Sullivan told us were the dying words of William Sydney Porter and challenged us to explain the contradiction. After we turned in our papers, Mr. Sullivan told us that we knew William Sydney Porter as the writer O. Henry.

(Fun fact: Some forty or fifty years later I discovered that Porter actually did not contradict himself. His dying words were “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.” Apparently Mr. Sullivan changed his words to create a challenging paradox for us to try to explain.)

Although I went to a private school with small classes and privileged students, Mr. Sullivan’s approach can work at all levels. I know this to be true because I taught working-class kids in a public high school, first generation African American college students in an HBCU, and young men serving sentences in a federal prison.

I used Mr. Sullivan’s “2-8-2” all the time. I got to know my students’ writing, and I’m convinced that their writing skills improved. They became writers, confident in their voices.

Frequent in-class writing worked then, and it should work in the age of Artificial Intelligence and with all the other ‘advances’ in our future.

However, policymakers and administrators have to behave sensibly and understand that ‘less is more.’ That means smaller classes, fewer students per teacher, and heightened trust in teachers. Those shouldn’t be a bridge too far, if we really want our young people to be thoughtful and capable citizens.

You can stop here if you wish. What follows is the story of my own dabbling in A.I., printed in my blog in April 2023, more than three years ago.

If you’re at all like me, you’re curious about Artificial Intelligence and new applications like ChatGPT and Bard. The brilliant Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says the world will never be the same again, but my interest is narrower: If students can simply ask Bard or ChatGPT to write their papers for them, how can teachers prevent this?

So, naturally, I turned to Bard, which told me (within seconds) that, while it can help students generate ideas, do research, improve their writing, and learn about different writing genres, it’s not supposed to be a substitute for original research and writing. Then it warned me to “Monitor students’ use of Bard to make sure that they are not plagiarizing or engaging in other forms of academic misconduct.”

Yeah, right. If I’m teaching English in a public high school, I probably have between 100 and 125 students! There aren’t enough hours in the day….

Second question: Can Bard help identify cheaters and plagiarists? Within seconds, I received an answer:

“There are a few things you can look for to tell the difference between original writing and prose provided by Bard.

  • Original writing is typically more creative and original than prose provided by Bard. Bard is trained on a massive dataset of text, so it can be very good at generating text that is grammatically correct and factually accurate. However, it is not always able to generate text that is creative or original.
  • Original writing is typically more personal and engaging than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a machine learning model, so it does not have the same level of understanding of human emotions and experiences as a human writer. As a result, its writing can be dry and impersonal.
  • Original writing is typically more nuanced and complex than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a large language model, but it is still under development. As a result, it can sometimes struggle to understand the nuances of human language. This can lead to writing that is simplistic or even nonsensical.

……

  • Ask yourself if the writing sounds like it was written by a human. Bard-generated text can sometimes sound robotic or unnatural. Original writing should sound like it was written by a human.

To put this the test, I gave Bard the following task:

I am one of six children, the second oldest and the first-born son. We grew up on a small farm with chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I’m now 81. Please write a short memoir of no more than 200 words about my childhood.

Within seconds, Bard spit out this:

“I was born in 1942, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in the Midwest. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories.

Now that I am 81 years old, I still look back on my childhood with fondness. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

Boring, and also wrong, and so I responded:

This is inaccurate. I was born in 1941, and our farm was in Connecticut. Worse, however, it does not capture either the small pleasures of collecting the eggs every morning or learning to milk cows, and it also does not capture the deep pain of watching a pig or steer that I raised being slaughtered. Please rewrite.

In just a few seconds, Bard responded by adding a few paragraphs, highlighted below to make it easier for you to read: “Sure, here is a more accurate and detailed memoir:

I was born in 1941, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in Connecticut. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

One of my favorite things to do was collect the eggs every morning. I would wake up early and go to the chicken coop, where I would find a dozen or so eggs waiting for me. I would carefully collect the eggs and put them in a basket, then bring them back to the house. My mother would use the eggs to make breakfast, and I would always get to eat one of the freshest eggs in the world.

Another thing I loved to do was milk the cows. I would go to the barn in the evening and bring the cows into the milking parlor. I would sit on a stool and milk each cow in turn, collecting the milk in a bucket. The milk would then be used to make butter, cheese, and ice cream.

Of course, there were also some challenges growing up on a farm. One of the hardest things was watching the animals being slaughtered. I knew that it was necessary to eat meat, but I still felt bad for the animals. I would often cry when I saw them being killed.

Overall, though, I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

OK, but even with this information, the writing remains pedestrian and without emotion. Human writers would know not to begin with their birthday, for one thing. They might lead with a sentence designed to keep the reader’s interest. Something like, “70 years later, at age 81, I can still hear the terrified squealing of the hog as it was strung up by its hind feet to be slaughtered….”

John Merrow

former Education Correspondent, PBS NewsHour

My blog: themerrowreport.com

“I don’t want to BE old when I am old.”  Jack LaLanne

Categories Literacy, Teachers and Teaching, Technology
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