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State report cards show growth, path forward for our schools

Editorials

Students, teachers, staff, parents and taxpayers throughout the Mahoning Valley and Ohio have reason to smile over this week’s release of the humongous batch of 2025-26 Ohio School Report Cards. Collectively, they document a large majority of our public school systems making the grade. Statewide, grades for English language arts skills have reached a five-year high of 62% proficiency. “Every subgroup that we have made progress over this last year in literacy,” Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Director Steve Dackin touted Tuesday. Likewise, math proficiency among ...

Unleash artificial intelligence

Editorials

Cell phones made my life easier. So did the internet. Artificial intelligence may enrich it even more. But lots of people are worried. “Stop AI or we’re all going to die!” shout protesters. It’s possible that AI will decide that we humans are in the way and imprison us or kill us. Not likely, say AI specialists, but possible. Anthropic’s CEO just warned that AI is advancing faster than our ability to control it. He and other AI executives say they want to slow it down. He proposes embedding independent “evaluators” inside his company to assess risks. He also ...

The war in Ukraine is becoming very inconvenient for Trump

Editorials

One of the challenges with writing about the war in — and on — Ukraine is that so little changes. What I mean about so little changing are the moral considerations. Ukraine is the victim of a lawless, brutal, unprovoked invasion by a politically backward and dysfunctional would-be empire ruled by a murderous autocrat. That assessment was obvious on Feb. 24, 2022 when the full-scale invasion was launched, and it was obvious in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. The challenge of writing about the war is that once you’ve said that, saying it again just feels repetitive. The longer ...

Don’t let the war on woke lull all Americans to sleep

Editorials

History is written to be argued about, I have often said. Recent efforts by the Trump administration’s culture war have offered numerous examples. In recent days, we have seen Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a break from the administration’s war against Iran, announce the reinstallation of a Confederate memorial that had been removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023. History buffs may recall that the sculpture had been removed as part of a congressionally mandated effort to rid military bases and sites of Confederate names and images. If you are one of those ...

Too many Americans wrongly confuse liberty with license

Editorials

The Founding Fathers who fought for liberty wouldn’t recognize how people define the word today. A recently released survey from the Indispensable Institute for Family Studies shows vice has a vice grip on young men. Among men 18 to 29 years old, 27% view pornography daily and another 16% do so several times a week. Young men who view pornography multiple times a day are about twice as likely to be lonely and depressed. It’s not just young men doing things that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Public libraries host drag queen story hours, exposing little children ...

Husted campaign fires yet another problematic staffer

Editorials

Plenty of politicians are getting caught saying the quiet part out loud these days, but few have been as bold as Stephen Woytek, political director for U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio. Woytek was rightly fired by Husted after discovery of social media activity that at best indicates a person so out of touch he should not be working on Husted’s campaign. At one point, he was using as his Facebook profile picture a photograph of soldiers from the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. That would be Hitler’s personal bodyguard. Woytek’s social media accounts also featured photos of him ...