Thursday, September 24th, 2026

Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

On this day in 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect nine Black students as they entered Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Top of the Fold today: Why traders give Amy Acton the edge, and the Ohio House votes on suspending the state's gas tax.

And from Mister Rogers to Sputnik, our editorial argues that Ohio schools can't afford to wait to teach AI.

COLUMBUS — Traders on prediction markets now favor Democrat Amy Acton over Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. 

On Polymarket, Acton stood at 59% and Ramaswamy at 42% as of Tuesday. Kalshi showed a similar split. 

Ramaswamy's odds hit a record low Monday. Acton's campaign has refused to debate him, calling him a "scam artist." Voters decide Nov. 3.

COLUMBUS — House Speaker Matt Huffman, Senate President Rob McColley and Vivek Ramaswamy previewed a 90-day suspension of Ohio's motor fuel tax, targeting a Sept. 30 vote requiring 66 House votes. 

The roughly $640-700 million cost would draw from ODOT cash reserves, then the General Revenue Fund, avoiding the Rainy Day Fund if possible. 

Leaders said the bill remains a standalone measure, rejecting ties to unrelated policy like Acton's data-center moratorium. 

Gov. DeWine hasn't committed to signing.

WASHINGTON — A bill to keep data centers from driving up people's power bills is stuck in the U.S. Senate. 

Ohio Sen. Jon Husted tried to pass it on Sept. 17, one day after the House approved it 417 to 3, but Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich objected. 

He said the bill is too weak because it only asks states to consider making data centers pay for new power lines instead of requiring it.

The bill is still alive, but time is short.

Americans are nervous about artificial intelligence. A Pew Research Center survey this summer found 52% of adults are more concerned than excited about AI.

That unease is understandable, and familiar.

During the Industrial Revolution, workers called Luddites smashed the machines replacing them. Their fears were real, and the transition was painful. But the machines won, and the jobs that followed built the modern middle class.

When television arrived in the late 1940s, there was a national panic that it would rot young minds. (To be fair, the rot came much later, with the launch of social media, but that's an editorial for another day.) Within a decade, the TV set went from a novelty for the wealthy to a fixture in nearly every household in the U.S. Thanks to Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo, it became a powerful tool for learning. And thanks to people like Edward R. Murrow, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite, it became an information hub.

With social media, we handed kids a powerful tool without teaching them to use it wisely. We can't make that mistake twice.

We are rarely ready for progress. Most of us have a burning desire to remember when things were less complicated. Nostalgia pulls us back, but progress comes anyway.

Parents and teachers have valid concerns about cheating, student privacy, and kids outsourcing their thinking. In a June NPR/Ipsos poll, 54% of teachers said AI makes it harder for students to develop critical thinking.

Those concerns make the case for teaching AI. Rather than surrender to the idea that AI thinks for students, schools can use it to sharpen thinking. In fact, 78% of teachers in that poll want responsible AI use taught in school. Who better than teachers, with the support of parents, to lead that effort?

Ohio has taken a big first step as the first state to require every district to adopt an AI policy, and those policies should put student privacy first. But the law does not require schools to teach AI. Without real instruction, Ohio students risk falling behind their counterparts in places like China.

China is building AI into its curriculum from the first grade on. Hangzhou's plan has high schoolers designing their own AI systems, and Beijing now requires AI lessons every year starting at age 6. That isn't outsourcing thinking. It's training it. We don't need Beijing's mandates, but we should match its urgency.

Willoughby-Eastlake isn't waiting. This fall, it's rolling out high school courses that let students use AI to tailor classes to their interests.

In June, the OECD and European Commission released AI literacy standards for schools. State lawmakers should adopt standards like these and fund the teacher training to back them up.

This matters outside of the classroom, learning center, or apprenticeship program. Pew also found the share of U.S. workers using AI for at least some of their work jumped from 16% to 21% in about a year. The tools that will shape the future aren't just coming at us fast. They're coming at us in milliseconds.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, America answered in its classrooms, pouring money into math and science education. That generation put a man on the moon. We are more than a beacon of freedom. We are a gigantic spotlight, and part of that freedom is the freedom to welcome and manage progress. We need guardrails, not roadblocks.

Ignore AI, and our children and our nation grow weaker. Start kids early, teach them with a sense of purpose, and do it now.

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