Trump Threatens to Sue Think-Tank for Publishing a Report He Doesn’t Like

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
2

https://share.google/DwYvniOIxZNXpV1Md

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is a centrist, Democratic-aligned think tank in D.C. It is known as a haven for high-Democrats when Republicans are in power and as an incubator for new policies. It is to the Democratic Party what the Heritage Foundation is to the Republican Party, except that the Heritage Foundation is allied with the extremists in the GOP, not the centrists.

CAP recently published a report concluding that Trump’s decision to station troops in Los Angeles, Memphis, and the District of Columbia cost $1.7 billion but had not reduced crime. Trump didn’t like that report. He didn’t agree with its conclusion.

Understand that journalists and think tanks publish articles critical of elected officials every day. Elected officials may use their bully pulpit to disagree, but they can’t stop critics from voicing their views..

That’s the way it has been, but Trump likes to break norms.

Trump has retained a lawyer and threatened to sue CAP for $5 billion.

Categories Education Reform

Jamelle Bouie on the Real Natalie Harp Scandal

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
2

For several days, a relatively unknown White House aide became a very well-known White House aide. Until recently, few people knew the name Natalie Harp. Now she is front-page news across the country.

While some writers have speculated about the relationship between the aging Trump and his attractive young assistant, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says that salacious speculation misses the real scandal. Harp filters the news that Trump gets. She gives him good news. She posts items on his social media. She even communicates with foreign powers on his behalf. She is one of the most powerful people in the government. CNN reported that she posted scores of tweets supporting Trump on January 6, 2021, urging readers to fight for him and overturn “the steal.” Those tweets have since been deleted.

This is not normal, unless you hearken back to the time when Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, and his wife acted on his behalf.

Bouie writes:

Last month, after a warning that there might be an Iran-sponsored attempt on his life, President Trump secretly left Air Force One for a military jet when he was leaving the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. His Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his key deputy, Stephen Miller were left to fly on Air Force One.

Who did Trump bring on his emergency departure plane? There was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; a White House aide, Dan Scavino; and Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant.

Harp was in the news this week after Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia mentioned her in a stump speech, as an aside to an attack on Trump. “And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

The White House pounced, attacking Ossoff in crude, juvenile terms. But rather than change the subject, the ferocity of the response drove new questions about Harp’s role and relationship to the president. On MSNOW, my Times newsroom colleague Maggie Haberman referred to Harp as the president’s “comfort blanket.” And that role appears to include information management, as Haberman noted in an article she wrote with Shawn McCreesh:

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.

Harp posts on social media in Trump’s name and even responds to foreign leaders in his name. She spends more time with Trump than any other aide and reports exclusively to him and no one else.

If the presidency is a job of crisis management, in which the principal task is to deal with an endless number of fires of various sizes and scope, then the most important thing a president can have is good information, to help him know what to handle, what to delegate and what to delay.

If Harp has as much control over Trump’s information environment as she appears to hold — if she is the one shaping his sense of the outside world — then it is entirely reasonable to say that Natalie Harp is one of the most powerful people in the United States.

The reason the Harp story has caught fire is that it is salacious — the elderly president spends nearly all of his waking hours with a young, attractive aide — but the reason it matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.

He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear. Trump has dismantled every institutional structure designed to curb the worst aspects of the presidency — a tendency toward isolation and groupthink — and has instead sunk deeper into his own propaganda and invented reality.

Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Trump

Pentagon Fires Leadership of “Stars and Stripes” for Exercising Freedom of the Press

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
3

Pete Hegseth has made clear his determination to control press coverage of his actions. He decided which media would get space in the press rooms of the Pentagon, kicking out some established journalists to make room for right-wing journalists. He tried to monitor all information coming from the Pentagon.

This week, he fired the leadership of the military’s “Stars and Stripes,” which has always enjoyed editorial independence. Hegseth can’t tolerate that. He wants total control.

Although he was a talking head on FOX, he has no respect for freedom of the press.

The New York Times reported:

The Defense Department on Friday fired the publisher and the editor in chief of Stars and Stripes, a government-funded news outlet that reports on the U.S. military, according to a senior Pentagon official and the dismissed journalists.

The firings raised questions about the Pentagon’s willingness to ensure the editorial integrity of the publication that has reported extensively on difficulties faced by military communities as the war in Iran has dragged on. The terminations came about 10 days after Stars and Stripes journalists reported on hardships that Navy sailors were facing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier whose deployment was extended to nine months amid the war.

On Friday, the Pentagon sent termination notices to Erik Slavin, the editor in chief, and Max Lederer, the publisher, who had announced his retirement earlier this week, citing conflict with the Pentagon leadership on the paper’s direction. Lara Korte, a Middle East correspondent at the news outlet, was also fired on Friday, according to the official and a post she made on social media.

The Defense Department declined to comment. Capt. William Urban, the military deputy to the publisher who was brought to the role earlier this month, said in a letter published on Friday that his priority was to ensure “the highest quality of editorially independent reporting” at Stars and Stripes. Captain Urban’s previous role was as a senior spokesman for the Pentagon….

Why it matters:

“Stars and Stripes” is supposed to be an independent news organization for the military, not a propaganda mouthpiece for the Pentagon.

The ouster of the leadership of “Stars and Stripes” is a plain effort to muzzle the publication and turn it into a lapdog for Pete Hegseth.

This is a brief overview of how “Stars and Stripes” won its editorial independence, as told by blogger TCinLA:

In 1944, General George S. Patton Jr. was very upset with a 22-year old Sergeant who drew cartoons for “Stars and Stripes”. The Sergeant was Bill Mauldin, creator of two cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, who were considered to be the voice of American GIs on the front lines. Willie and Joe were always tired, needed a shave, were wearing the filthy fatigues they lived in on the front lines in Italy, and viewed the U.S. Army as a more threatening personal enemy than the Wehrmacht. The GIs agreed with everything they said. By 1945, the war in Europe was a slog through the coldest European winter in a century. In March 1945, General Patton summoned Mauldin to his Luxembourg headquarters, where over 45 minutes he accused Sgt. Mauldin of inciting mutiny and destroying military discipline through his unkempt character portrayals. Mauldin defended his work as a “safety valve” for combat infantrymen, resulting in a tense 45-minute standoff that ended in a stalemate.

It took an intervention by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to protect Mauldin and preserve the editorial independence of “Stars and Stripes,” preventing Patton from banning the paper or jailing the cartoonist. Eisenhower fiercely believed that “Stars and Stripes” should belong entirely to the front-line troops, famously declaring: “This newspaper should be the equivalent of a soldier’s hometown newspaper, with no censorship of its contents, other than for security.” Ike recognized that Willie and Joe served as a vital, non-destructive psychological safety valve. He knew that letting G.I.s laugh at their miserable conditions and blow off steam about overbearing officers actually preserved army morale. Too bad the current dildo running the Pentagon and his short-fingered thin-skinned felonious boss are too fucking stupid to understand that Eisenhower was smarter than all ten of them combined.

Originally when it was created by Congress in 1942, Start and Stripes occupied a unique place in American journalism: funded by the government, read by the military, but mandated by law to report the news independently, without editorial interference. This was because the America that could actually win wars believed US servicemen deserved real news, not Pentagon horseshit. (That happens to still be the law, should any congressional moron care to see it enforced.)

Cartoonist Bill Mauldin won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in “Stars and Stripes.”

You should read the full post by TCinLA, which reports on the recent episodes of censorship by the Trump administration, some of which have succeeded, others that have not.

Categories Censorship, Ethics, Freedom of the Press

Florida: Voters Oust Key Right-Wing School Board

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
4

If there was one school board in Florida that was the beachhead for Moms for Liberty’s efforts to push their agenda of censorship and right-wing ideology, it was the school board of Sarasota County. Last Tuesday, voters replaced the Moms for Liberty majority with moderates who want to make their public schools better, rather than a battleground for culture war issues.

The right-wing culture warriors won school board elections in other counties in the state, but Sarasota County is where their organization was born and gained national notoriety.

Lauren Lumpkin of The Washington Post reported:

A Florida school board that was at the epicenter of national debates over covid mask mandates and book bans lost its conservative majority this week, a change that some say signals a priority shift among voters.

Two Democratic-backed candidates beat out conservatives in Tuesday’s school board election in Sarasota, Florida, flipping the board’s majority. Helmed for the past year by a co-founder of Moms for Liberty — a conservative group that gained a national following with its parents’ rights messaging — the board is moving in a new direction, the winners said. A third Democratic-backed candidate will head to a runoff election against a contender endorsed by Republicans in November.

“I really think at the end of the day, regardless of political affiliation, our community was just tired of the culture wars, the political theater and being the center of national attention for all the wrong reasons,” said Megan Tennimon, a former teacher who won election to the board on Tuesday.


While Democrats say the flip indicates voters want to move on from fights over social issues, Moms for Liberty points to conservatives’ wins in other parts of Florida.


“Every couple of years someone in the media writes our obituary, and every couple of years parents show up and prove them wrong,” Tina Descovich, Moms for Liberty co-founder and chief executive, said Wednesday. “School boards are ground zero in the fight for parental rights, and last night Florida parents made that clear.”

During covid, the Sarasota County school district was among those that saw heated board meetings and headline grabbing debates over parents’ rights. High-profile conservative leaders with documented ties to the county include former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Charlie Kirk, the head of a pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA who was killed last year.

The Sarasota County School Board had been controlled by conservatives since 2022, on the heels of the pandemic. As school board meetings and elections, typically quiet and uncontroversial, became partisan battlegrounds, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) got involved around that time by endorsing candidates, something governors have rarely done.
His involvement in the local races came as he pushed an education agenda that included a ban on teaching young students — and later all students — about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Among those who won DeSantis’s support was Sarasota County School Board Chair Bridget Ziegler, first elected in 2014.

Ziegler, who was embroiled in a sex scandal in 2023 and refused to step down when her husband was accused of sexual assault, did not run for reelection this year. Ziegler’s husband was cleared of the sexual assault charge in 2024. She did not immediately return requests for comment.

Elsewhere in the state on Tuesday, a Democratic-backed school board candidate flipped a conservative seat in Orange County, one of the largest school districts in the country. On the same ballot, a democratic socialist won an upset primary victory in the U.S. Senate race.

“I think that they realized how destructive those divisive policies really were,” Beth Mayberry, another Democratic-backed winner in the Sarasota County School Board race, said about voters. A retired educator, Mayberry’s campaign focused on school funding and mental health.

“What they’ve seen in the last four years, with basically the tabloid happenings on the school board and a lot of the policies and resolutions that were being made, our general community did not agree with,” Mayberry said.

Another candidate endorsed by the local Democratic Party, Jimmy Glover, won the most votes in his race against two Republican opponents, but failed to capture more than 50 percent of the votes. This will trigger a runoff election in November.

If Glover wins, the board will be completely Democratic-backed — and he will be the first person of color to serve on the Sarasota County School Board, said David Dean, chair of the county’s Democratic Party.

Two other members, who were also supported by Democrats and have previously opposed conservative members, round out the five-member board.

While school board elections are nonpartisan, political parties typically endorse candidates they believe will support their priorities. Dean echoed sentiments that residents are fed up with the culture wars and instead want their school board to focus on teachers and students.
“School board meetings should be boring. They shouldn’t make the national news,” Dean said. “There’s certainly a shift in attitudes toward the MAGA agenda, even here.”

Led by conservatives, the Sarasota County School Board voted last year to remove references to race, sexuality and disability from its anti-bullying rules. In January, it reaffirmed the district’s stance to cooperate with law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ziegler, at the time, said it was a safety measure. “Our School District cannot provide safe harbor to criminals, including those who violate our immigration laws,” she wrote on social media.
However, the measure did not change anything because the district had already agreed to work with authorities, Tennimon said. “That resolution was designed to do nothing but instill fear in our community.”


Sarasota is still deep red — many voters support voucher programs and religion in schools.
Moms for Liberty rose to prominence during the pandemic, when conservative parents demanded more say over what their children learned in school — particularly around topics including race, sexuality and gender.


The group has expanded to about 130,000 members in 48 states since its founding in 2021, according to its website, hosting Donald Trump and DeSantis at its summit in 2023 in a run-up to the presidential election. It has since accrued influence in the GOP, in school board elections nationwide, and was called upon by the Trump administration to help shape national education programming.

The group has regularly attacked the LGBTQ+ community and spread “messages of anti-inclusion and hate” while aligning itself with extremist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But organization leaders are pushing back against reports that their influence on school board elections in their home state of Florida has waned. Moms for Liberty officials said 11 of the 15 school board candidates it endorsed in other races across the state won or advanced on Tuesday.

Heidi Brandt, a conservative who will face Glover in the runoff in November, said she was disappointed with the school board election outcome, but hopes the newcomers will concentrate on schools. Like the Democratic-backed candidates, she said she wants to remove political fights from the board.

“This is about our students and our teachers and our families, it’s not about a conservative or liberal majority or minority,” Brandt said. “I understand the celebrations and the turning of the tables, but I’m just truly praying that it’s not going to be about politics.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Education Reform

Trans Trailblazer in Tennis Looks Back with Regret

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
12

Renee Richards shocked the sports world in 1977 when she she sued for the right to play in the U.S. Open; she was a trans woman. She had been a successful opthamologist and an amateur tennis player. After she transitioned, she became a professional tennis player. Some events barred her, and she sued to participate in others. Now, in her 90s, she looks back with regret at some of her decisions, and she explains why. As a fully developed man, she now believes she had an unfair physical advantage. She rationalized her advantage because she was so much older than most if the women she played.

She was interviewed by Leah Asmelash of CNN:

In 1977, Dr. Renée Richards — a well-regarded ophthalmologist who’d spent most of her life as a very good amateur tennis player — sued for her right to play in the US Open.

Richards had played some competitions locally and throughout the country. She had the backing of tennis great Billie Jean King. And she had a tricky left-handed serve.

But Richards was a transgender woman, the first in the sport. Some tournaments allowed her to play, and opponents dropped out in protest. Others, like the Italian Open, accepted her at first only to change their minds days before the tournament’s start. And the US Open barred her completely.

A judge ruled that the US Open had violated New York State’s Human Rights Law, and that Richards could play. Though she was knocked out in the first round that year in singles, she was a finalist in women’s doubles. She went on to play in other tournaments and in 1981, at the age of 47, she retired from professional tennis.

Richards, now 92, describes herself as a steadfast supporter of trans rights. She also calls her own lawsuit “selfish” and says she opposes trans women and girls participating in women’s sports.

A new biography published this week, “Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer,” by the trans and nonbinary sportswriter Julie Kliegman, chronicles the challenges and contradictions of Richards’s life and career. Richards won acceptance in part because she was seen as a “one-off,” Kliegman said in an interview.

Competitors like Martina Navratilova, who is now a vocal opponent of trans women playing women’s sports, liked Richards as an individual, Kliegman said: “It’s often sort of easier to accept someone from a marginalized group when you have a personal relationship with them, as opposed to the abstraction of trans people who might be seen as coming to steal scholarships or prize money from cisgender women.”

While Richards is a strong supporter of trans rights, she now opposes the entry of trans women into women’s sport. She believes that she had an unfair physical advantage.

She thinks that the debate about bathrooms and trans people is ridiculous. People don’t make the momentous decision to transition so they can use bathrooms of the other sex.

Why does she now oppose trans women in women’s sports?

She said:

If a male who becomes a female went through male puberty, that person has an advantage over other females who were never males in the beginning and didn’t develop larger long bones and bigger chest cavities and larger hearts and a greater amount of muscle mass and bigger cardiac output and lung capacity. Even if they are deprived testosterone by their transition, that’s only part of the story. It’s not enough.

She added:

I thought I was being fair in competing with cisgender women because the competition was pretty close. I won some matches against top players. I lost some matches against poorly ranked players.

I thought that because I was older than the other players, that negated any advantage I might have had by having formerly been a male. I thought that it was a pretty equal playing field until I played in one match in 1979. I played in the women’s 35-and-over championship at Flushing Meadow, and I beat Nancy Richey, a Hall of Fame player. She won the French Open and a few other big tournaments. I beat her in the finals, and I was only 10 years older than she was.

And after I beat her in the finals, I said to myself, “I don’t think it’s fair. It’s not enough of an age difference.” So that got me to think that my opinion about allowing transgender women to play on the tour was inaccurate. I’ve been saying that it’s been fair because I’ve been playing against women that are 20 or more years younger than I am…

I didn’t think that the age would make such a difference. When I played that match against Nancy, I hadn’t conceived of it until then. I’d been playing against Chrissie (Evert) and Martina (Navratilova) and Tracy (Austin), and they had an advantage over me for sure because of the age difference. No matter the size and the muscle mass and so on, I was at a disadvantage playing Martina and Chrissie and Tracy, and I knew it, and they knew it…

Being a trans woman is something that is a right and should be respected. And if you’re a trans woman congressman, you don’t have any physical advantage over other congressmen or women.

Competitive sports are a totally different entity. Why do you think we have juniors and seniors and junior seniors and 35-and-overs and 150 pounders and lightweights and middleweights and bantamweights and heavyweights? Because sports is different.

Categories Gender, Sports

Connecticut: A Hedge Fund Billionaire Redefines the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
2

David Sirota’s The Lever posted an important article about a hedge fund billionaire who hopes to redefine the Democratic Party. I thought I had heard of all the billionaires who were trying to remodel education to their own specifications, but I had never come across Steve Mandel.

Like many other billionaires, Mandel’s great passion is charter schools. He has poured millions of dollars into political campaigns, trying to elect candidates who share his values. His great hope appears to be to block candidates who are progressives and who are pro-union.

The article, by Katya Schwerin and Luke Goldstein, traces Mandel’s rise, from his elite schooling at

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Reform

Sign up for the Network for Public Education Conference in Conroe, Texas, September 25-26!

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
0

The Network for Public Education (NPE) and NPE Action National Conference will take place from September 26 to September 27, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe in the Greater Houston area (Conroe, Texas). The theme for this year’s event is “Public Schools Build Democracy.”

NPE will gather parents, educators, scholars and citizens concerned about their public schools.

Please join us as we learn about ways to defend, protect and improve our public schools.

Registration cost: $199 (includes meals).

For the agenda and registration, open this link:

https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2026-national-conference/

Categories Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Resistance

Which President Has the Best Record for Job Creation?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
5

This is an interesting chart. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Categories Economy

Reading Fiction Is Good for Your Brain and Your Social Skills

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
6

Neuroscience confirms what many of us long suspected: Fiction is more powerful for developing the mind, social skills, empathy, and imagination than non-fiction. And yet for nearly two decades, American schools have been encouraged to downplay fiction. Teachers have been told to downplay novels, fewer novels are assigned, and fewer students read whole books.

Instead of reading stories, students read excerpts in preparation for the format of standardized tests. There, students are asked questions about extracts without a beginning, a middle or an end.

Why?

Seventeen years ago, the Common Core State Standards were introduced to the public as the salvation of education. Its sponsors claimed that they would raise scores and close or narrow achieve gaps.

The Common Core standards were funded almost entirely by the Gates Foundation and enthusiastically endorsed by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The Obama administration gave states a huge incentive to adopt the Common Core standards. States were required to endorse the Common Core to qualify to compete for a large chunk of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.

Most states adopted the Common Core standards, sometimes without actually reading or reviewing them. Behind the Common Core was the dubious belief that standardization of standards, tests, textbooks, and teacher training would have a dramatic positive effect on student test scores. That turned out not to be true.

But even worse, David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core (and now the President of the College Board, which publishes the SAT tests, the AP tests, and other standardized tests) believed that “informational text” was more valuable than fictional works.

The Common Core recommended that the curriculum be weighted 50-50 between literary and informational texts in fourth grade; 45-55 in eighth grade; and 30-70 in twelfth grade. That is, only 30 percent of reading in twelfth grade would be fiction.

Tom Loveless, then at the Brookings Institution, showed how these ratios, which were literally based on nothing, no research, led to a decline in the assignment of fiction in schools.

In response to the widespread adoption of the Common Core, textbook publishers and test publishing companies de-emphasized fiction. The National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the federal test called NAEP, downgraded fiction in its national tests for fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades.

According to an article by Richard Sima in the The Washington Post, the theory that fiction was of lesser value was wrong.

Sima, a neuroscientist and science journalist, writes that fiction is better for the growing mind than informational text.

He writes:

Reading in general — newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books — has been linked to slower rates of cognitive decline in older adults and even longer lives.

But reading fiction may have unique benefits. For example, the amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place.

Why? Fiction forces you to imagine a story’s world and characters. It makes you grapple with different perspectives, mentally inhabiting distinct points of view, according to Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This can help us find “better insight into our own experiences, insight into the experiences of others who are very different from us,” said Raymond Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, who recently wrote a review on the benefits of reading narrative fiction. “It just tends to evoke a form of reflection and contemplation, which can only be good for us.”

Why reading is actually social

Social health is important for overall health. And it turns out that reading, though often thought of as a solitary activity, can boost our social abilities.

To understand why, it helps to look at how reading shapes us as we grow.

Between ages 4 and 6, children develop a theory of mind — the ability to understand that others have different beliefs, perspectives and feelings. Studies find that children exposed to more storybooks are further along this developmental milestone than those exposed to fewer ones, Mar said.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 studies found that children who read more storybooks had more empathy. And there is evidence that empathy and reading go both ways. Better reading comprehension was a predictor of empathy later in life, while empathy also was a predictor of better reading ability, according to a 2024 study of more than 900 children. And adolescents who read more for fun became more social adults, a 2023 study found…

Reading fiction “presents to us a complex cognitive and emotional simulation of the social world,” which is useful in the real world, Mar said.

The power of storytelling

These benefits may be due, in part, to the power of storytelling.

Neuroimaging studies find that brain networks involved in understanding stories overlap with brain networks needed for theory of mind. This suggests that “while engaging with stories, we’re also pulling online the same kinds of brain networks that we use to understand other people,” said Mar, who wrote a review about these studies.

Other forms of storytelling, such as television and movies, may provide similar benefits, but “one of the things that you do when you read is you have to construct the world” in your head, Buttrick said. “The world is not given to you. You have to do the work of imagining.”

The article goes on in greater detail about why fiction is more important for young people than non-fiction, the exact opposite of the premises of the Common Core.

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Reform, NAEP, Standardized Testing

An Astonishing and Appropriate Use of AI

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2026 //
8

CNN reported an amazing story: Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher papyrus scrolls that were burned almost 2,000 years ago. Previous attempts to unravel the scrolls had damaged them, even destroyed some. But these researchers created a way to expose their contents without unraveling them.

Lianne Kolirin of CNN reported:

CNN) — A papyrus scroll that was burned and carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted almost 2,000 years ago has been virtually unrolled and partially deciphered with the help of artificial intelligence.

The scroll — named PHerc. 1667 — is one of hundreds from the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which was buried under volcanic debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, according to the Vesuvius Challenge, an initiative focused on decoding the texts of the Herculaneum scrolls without needing to physically unroll them.

Preserved under mud and ash in a villa believed to have once been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the scrolls were discovered by an Italian farmer in the 18th century. The collection is the only large-scale library known to have survived from classical antiquity.

Burned so badly they were carbonized, the scrolls are extremely fragile. Over the years, scholars have tried to unroll them using a range of methods, including weights, chemicals, gases and pulverization, though this often led to the scrolls being damaged or destroyed.

The Vesuvius Challenge was launched by Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, and entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross in 2023 to encourage researchers from around the world to try to decipher the scrolls by virtually unwrapping and decoding them.

Virtual unwrapping begins with a CT scan of each coiled-up, warped papyrus.

After following along the curved layers in the scan, researchers then virtually flatten the scrolls and explore them using advanced AI that has been trained to identify ink on the page.

There have been numerous developments in recent years but this latest one — announced at a conference in Naples, Italy on Thursday — is a “historic breakthrough,” according to those involved.

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in fully unwrapping one scroll, revealing an area measuring almost 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) of text across 20 columns.

“For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible,” Seales said in a statement published on Thursday. “Today — after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), academic research and an innovation contest — we are finally able to read them.”

To see a photograph of the burnt scroll and to learn what experts found written in the scroll, open the link.

Categories History, Innovation, Technology
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