New View EDU Episode 96: Educational Ethics in Independent Schools

Available November 10, 2026

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What is the relationship between education and democracy, and what are the ethical complexities facing educators as they teach dialogue and critical-thinking skills in a time of discord and divides? Meira Levinson, political philosopher and scholar of educational ethics, joins host Morva McDonald for a conversation about how to engage students in a necessary exchange of ideas without encouraging potentially harmful debates.

Meira encourages educators to recognize that this is not the first time in history when risk and uncertainty have plagued the classroom due to broader social conditions. What’s different this time, she says, is the addition of concerns about developing technologies like AI, which adds a level of instability. But, she says, the purposes of schooling—which can include different visions of equipping young people to participate in democratic communities—remain educators’ to define and enact, and independent schools are uniquely positioned to do that. One potential challenge Meira identifies is the paradoxical nature of clearly defining values and purpose, thereby shaping the makeup of the school’s community. To what degree are we inadvertently creating less ideological diversity within our schools, and how do we think about the trade-offs inherent in those choices?

In making any ethically complex choice, particularly around what topics are available to our students for discussion and debate, Meira encourages educators to consider an open vs. settled framework. How can we decide what topics are “open”—in other words, able to be discussed and debated without significant risk for legitimate harm—and which are “settled,” or not up for discussion due to a number of factors, including cultural norms, community values, and the risk for unnecessary harm? She points out that the presence of disagreement itself is not a predictor of whether a topic should be discussed; disagreement can be an indication that our school communities are healthy and able to foster dialogue. But every ethical question comes with trade-offs and compromises to the values of some members of a community, and understanding and articulating those trade-offs is part of making decisions that keep schools aligned with both their values and their greater public purpose.

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Morva and Meira explore in this episode include:

• If you were to articulate the most important purposes of schooling in a democratic society, what would those be?
• What is the difference between productive disagreement and harmful conflict?
• What distinguishes an ethical dilemma from a management problem?
• What are some of the challenges you see school leaders consistently facing when it comes to recognizing and responding to ethical dilemmas? What might help?

Episode Highlights

• “I'm interested in students as autonomous decision makers, right? Like thinking about how we help give power to students and give students a sense of agency. And how they can take that agency then into their adult lives. And again, it's our collective lives and how we structure that collectivity and who is thought to have power and who doesn't, and whose voice we respect and whose voice we don't, and so forth, that I think really helps to shape those opportunities for student voice-making and helps to shape their own assessment of whether their exercise of voice matters.” (4:50)
• “Part of I think what's interesting actually, as we think about the aims of education with independent schools these days, is that this civic disruption, I think, is creating some challenging opportunities for schools to decide. So, like, as there is greater polarization and divide over some core values and principles about, you know, who we should be as a country or as a community, like what we stand for…some schools that I've been talking with have decided to kind of not necessarily double down, but to be really clear with themselves and with their families.” (13:23)
• “One of the things that really struck me when I was a teacher and that has continued to strike me over the last 30 years is how little space we give to people who work in schools to be able to articulate and be honest about ethical uncertainty, and the kinds of values trade-offs that we face. There's so much pressure to articulate like ethical clarity and to say, you know, we're doing this because we are committed to that value, which suggests that doing something else means that you're like, you know, unethical, that you're not adhering to that value at all, and that there's no trade-offs. But everything that we decide to do actually involves values trade-offs.” (29:43)

Resource List

• Follow Meira’s work and get some of the resources she mentions at justiceinschools.org and valuesinteaching.org.
• Read Meira’s article on how educational ethics can guide teaching in the age of AI.
• Check out this article on “Dilemma-Oriented Leadership”, co-authored by Meira for School Administrator magazine.
• Get copies of Meira’s books.
• Learn more from David Labaree, whose work Meira mentions in this episode.
• Read Controversy in the Classroom by Diana Hess, which Meira discusses in this episode.

Full Transcript

• Read the full transcript here.

Related Episodes

• Episode 95: Shaping Future Citizens Through Dialogue
• Episode 84: Good Conflict
• Episode 80: The Future of Inclusion
• Episode 66: Schools in a Time of Hope and Cynicism
• Episode 64: Pluralism in Education
• Episode 62: Wisdom Road
• Episode 56: Helping Students Shape Dynamic Futures
• Episode 17: The Opportunities and Obligations of Citizenship in K-12 Education

About Our Guest

Meira Levinson is the Chen Family Educational Foundations Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Meira is a political theorist/philosopher of education who is working to start a global field of educational ethics that is philosophically rigorous, disciplinarily and experientially inclusive, and both relevant to and informed by educational policy and practice. In doing so, she draws upon scholarship from multiple disciplines as well as her eight years of experience teaching middle school humanities, civics, history, and English in Atlanta and Boston public schools. 

Meira has written or co-edited nine books, including Civic Contestation in Global Education and Educational Equity in a Global Context (both 2024, with Ellis Reid, Tatiana Geron, and Sara O’Brien), Instructional Moves for Powerful Teaching in Higher Education (2023, co-authored with Jeremy Murphy), Democratic Discord in Schools (2019, with Jacob Fay), winner of the 2020 AERA Moral Development and Education SIG Outstanding Book Award, and Dilemmas of Educational Ethics (2016, with Jacob Fay). Her book No Citizen Left Behind (2012) won awards in political science, philosophy, social studies, and education and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese. Meira shares educational ethics resources on JusticeinSchools.org, materials to support K-12 educators working in politically charged environments at Values in Teaching, and resources for youth activists and teacher allies at YouthinFront.net. Each of these projects reflects Levinson's commitment to achieving productive cross-fertilization—without loss of rigor—among scholarship, policy, and practice.

Meira earned a B.A. in philosophy from Yale and a D.Phil. in politics from Nuffield College, Oxford University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Guggenheim, the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the National Academy of Education. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Meira taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.