Read the full transcript of Episode 96 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, in which 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.
Morva McDonald: At a time when democratic institutions are under strain, public trust is fragile, and communities are increasingly polarized, education faces a question that is both timeless and urgent. What is the role of schools in sustaining a healthy democracy? Is it our responsibility simply to prepare students for college and careers, or must we also prepare them to engage across difference, navigate complexity, participate thoughtfully in civic life, and contribute to a more just society?
Throughout my own work in education, I've been interested in the intersection of leadership, justice, and human flourishing. I've come to believe that schools are not merely places where students acquire knowledge, they are communities where young people learn what it means to belong, whose voices matter, how power operates, and what obligations we have to one another. The choices we make, as you know, as educators, shape not only individual opportunity, but also the civic future we create together.
Today's guest, Dr. Meira Levinson, has spent her career helping educators grapple with these very questions. A political philosopher and the Chin Family Educational Foundation's professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, she is one of the leading voices in the fields of civic education, educational ethics, educational equity, and democratic participation. Drawing on her experience as both a scholar and a former public school teacher, her work challenges educators to think deeply about how schools can cultivate informed, engaged citizens while confronting persistent inequities that undermine democratic ideals. Her award-winning scholarship, including No Citizen Left Behind, Democratic Discord in Schools, and more recent work on educational equity and ethics, examines how schools can prepare young people not only to participate in democracy, but also improve it.
In our conversation today, we'll explore the relationship between education and democracy, the challenges of civic education in polarized times, the ethical dilemmas educators face, and what it means to pursue equity in ways that strengthen both individual opportunity and the common good.
Hi, Meira. Welcome to New View EDU. I want to kick off by trying to understand a little bit about your career. I mean, you spent your career really thinking about democracy and citizenship and ethics and education. And I'm just curious, like what initially drew you to those questions? Why is that the thing that you’ve spent your life trying to understand and support educators around?
Meira Levinson: Thanks, Morva. it's funny, I think in some ways actually the democracy and civic part was a bit of an accident. I had been trained as a political theorist before I became a school teacher. And political theorists spend a lot of their time thinking about democracy and civics and so forth. And I was actually sort of countercultural in like thinking, like there's just, you know, there's all this stuff written about it, but there's not enough time spent thinking about kind of the nitty gritty about how schools work and how that influences kids and what are…and the sort of power relationships and what are our responsibilities there.
But two things happened, I guess, that got me interested in this. One is my coming to recognize the ways in which the opportunities that my students had, and that we as teachers also conceived of our students' opportunities, was so shaped by the socio-political context in which they lived, right? You know.
I was teaching at the time, say, in the Atlanta public schools and then in the Boston public schools, and especially in Atlanta, although also in Boston, so much of what we were talking to kids about was the opportunity for, like, individual self advancement, right? And you know, these were mostly low income kids of color. And I was learning from my colleagues, who were mostly all African-American educators with deep roots in the community. But what we were sort of saying to kids was that the opportunity to lead good lives was an opportunity that was open to them if they could escape where they came from. And that just seemed terrible, right? That was a terrible, terrible message. And certainly not a message that anybody has ever given to my kids.
So then I started thinking about the ways in which actually that's shaped by our civic and democratic context, and we need to think about like collective action and so forth. So I guess that's one reason that I'm really interested in this. And then a second reason is that 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.
And so I think if we care about young people, and young people having the sense that their voice matters and can matter and that they deserve respect, then we actually do need to pay attention to these broader questions around civics and democracy. And then on the ethics front, I will say, as I said, I'm a political theorist by training, and part of the big questions that you ask are about, like as a political theorist, is about relationships of power and domination and oppression and and like legitimate authority and justifications for, you know, the structures that we're part of and so forth. And like those are, those ethical questions come up in schools and you know school districts and school systems and so forth all the time.
Morva McDonald: Meira, I think that's really interesting. And I was in a school this week and I was talking to people in schools. And one of the things that they were talking about as they were beginning their year was this balance, right? Between something that I think you're highlighting here, which is the balance between kids' sense of agency, their individual agency, their drive, their ambition for themselves, and their connection, right?
In your words, to the collective, to the community. And schools are increasingly, I think, really thinking about the community for a variety of reasons. I'm curious when you think about your time, right, as a school practitioner and over the course of your career, obviously, to what extent would you say that the time that we're currently in is similar or different, right? What's changed or what hasn't changed about the time we're in from your perspective related to these issues?
Meira Levinson: So I think the time that we're in like feels super duper intense, right? I think people from everywhere on the political spectrum are really worried about the state of our democracy or our quasi-democracy. We're worried about it for very different reasons and we see, you know, different threats, but like we have, we share a collective sense of threat and of like, fragility.
And I think that sense of fragility, instability, lack of safety, right? Worry about like, what role do schools play in helping to prepare young people for the world that we live in and how are schools navigating the world that we're living in, right, at this time of instability and uncertainty? Like that feels super duper heightened. And challenging, I think. In many ways more so than at any other time during my career in education, which I guess like I started teaching in 1996. So I guess I've now been in education for like 30 years.
But although, you know, there were also times, say after 9/11, right? There are times you know, there have been various times in which, even over the last 30 years, right? Where there's been, you know, strong sense of polarization, strong sense of being under threat, questions about what role schools and teachers are going to play in this, in these moments of uncertainty, et cetera. I think, you know, on a longer historical timeframe, I think that, you know, these are challenges that schools and educators and school leaders and students have faced, you know, multiple times, right?
I don't think that this is a unique condition. I do think we are dealing not only with the political, you know, challenges and questions, also with, you know, expanding economic inequality that, you know, creates challenges. And then of course the technological, this, you know, new technological revolution with AI, which has, you know, not only tons of implications for schools and teaching and learning and stuff, but also actually for our democracy, right? Including, you know, questions about can we believe what we, not just what we read, but what we hear, what we see. And that, I think, you know, poses some real risks. As well as say, you know, concerns over, are any of us going to have jobs in 10 years? And what does it mean, you know, to prepare kids for a future where we really don't know what the future is going to look like?
Morva McDonald: Yeah, you've you've touched on something that I think I hear increasingly school folks and educators broadly really thinking deeply about, and not to suggest that it's unique at this period of time, but really grappling with the question of what is the purpose of schooling. And what is the purpose of schooling in a, in a democracy, right? Like what does it mean in a democracy? And I'm curious, right, what your take is on that.
Is it, is the purpose of schooling the same as it was related to kind of the democracy at large, civic engagement and civic education, or is it changing in some way now that we need to consider and reconsider what it is we're trying to do with students?
Meira Levinson: I think there is no one purpose of schooling, right?
Morva McDonald : Of course.
Meira Levinson: And you know, I you said you had been at Stanford, so I'm sure that you know David Labaree’s work and you know his sort of famous essay, where he talks about how American education part of the challenge is that there are these three different purposes, there's sort of the democratic purpose, there's the social efficiency purpose, and then the like the social mobility purpose, right? And that you know, equipping young people to be members of an inclusive democratic community is different from equipping them to say, you know, fulfill roles, including roles in the, in the workplace, you know, well, and is different from education for, you know, individual advancement, and how those may be in tension with one another.
But of course within any of those things, right? Like there can also be multiple purposes, right? You know, even as we think about, like, education for democracy. Is this about equipping people who are good rule followers and who are helping even to like hold up the institutions that currently exist? Is this about educating young people for some sort of social and civic transformation, for having a vision of the future that's really different from the, you know, world that we're living in and teaching them the skills or the dispositions or the knowledge base that they would need for that? Is it about, say, staving off threats, which is, being attentive to that and being good citizens in that way, which is actually like something different because in fact, in the face of perceived threats, we can see massive institutional transformation.
And I think the other thing that's important is like, especially independent schools, part of what they are offering to families is the chance to find a place that feels consonant with their values and with their envisioned aims, right? So, you know, unlike public schools, which both are more subject to public decision-making influence, deliberation, right, on what they are supposed to be doing. Right. So you can have the legislature or you can have an elected school board or whatever say, this is what we are about, and which also have an obligation to serve all people in the, you know, local community and and have some arguable obligation to the public.
Independent schools, some may think of themselves as having like this public obligation or as trying to be, you know, to serve a hugely diverse array of students and families for whatever reason. Other independent schools are really clear, you know, this is who we are, this is who we serve, these are our values, these, you know, these are our purposes. And you take us or you leave us, right?
And 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. How we interpret certain values like anti-discrimination, right? Do we view anti-discrimination as being one where we offer certain kinds of preferences or accommodations because of histories of past injustices? Or do we view that as actually being discriminatory, right?
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. This is what we mean. Like when we say that we stand for inclusion or for anti-discrimination, or like we're not actually going to give up our ideal of equity because you know, equity has now come under threat.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, I think in the past few years people have gotten more clear that the need for clarity and specificity there has been heightened and I know people in schools are working on that.
Meira Levinson: Yes.
But what's interesting is that then part of what happens as a result, as they get that clarity, is that then there's actually greater sorting that happens, right? And this is something also that I know that schools are really wrestling with. So they can become clearer, they can become more specific, they can say to families, we understand and we respect, like, who you are and what you believe, but therefore we might not be the right place for you.
But then what is happening is that they are perhaps inadvertently contributing to the greater polarization and to our sort of sorting ourselves into homogeneous separate groups, which is exactly opposed to some of the sort of civic and democratic aims that these very schools may have. So I think that's a real challenge.
Morva McDonald: Yeah. It's an interesting question, right? As a, I think as an independent school, head of school or community to really think about the relationship I think that you're highlighting, and tell me if I'm wrong, between smaller communities’ values, right—the reflection of those values inside of an institution like a specific school—and the commitment to the collective.
In independent schools, this is quite different than it is in a public school system, right? A public school system to some extent, embedded in it, has some commitment. Whether that's lived out well or not is a different question, right? But it has a commitment to the collective. And an independent school can lean into the sorting function that I think you're talking about. And it has to grapple with what is its role to the common good.
There's been a lot of discussion in independent schools about what is the public purpose of independent schooling. It would be interesting for this audience to grapple with that question that I think you've so clearly highlighted as one of the things that can be in tension, if in fact your value is to support the common good.
Meira Levinson: Yes, right. Because yes, if your value is to support the common good, potentially part of what you want to do is to create a space within your school that is inclusive and representative of multiple perspectives and you know, including multiple political stances and so forth, to help the students engage and grapple with and respect and you know, come to value each other and so forth. And if you find yourself doing that less and less in order to stand up for the values that you stand for, then there's this question, so what, how are we promoting the common good or the collective good in that way?
I think also, it is hard at these times to know how to stand up for promoting the collective good when so many people are feeling so uncertain and potentially under threat as to whether there is or can be a collective good.
Morva McDonald: I want to dig a little around with something with you, which is, you've written a lot about democratic disagreement, and many educators, right, are really struggling with how to discuss contentious issues in their classrooms, in their schools, how to hold that space for division.
You know, and it comes up everywhere. I was, it was really interesting. I was in a school recently, and they were talking about how they were really working with their students to engage in civic discourse, and that in many ways the parents were looking at the school and at their own kids for help because they feel like they don't have those skills and abilities, but the kids are learning them, which is maybe a positive thing to see, right? But also worrisome in a way.
But I'm interested in like, talk to us a little bit about the advice and the ways you have to help schools think about that kind of division in the context of teaching and learning.
Meira Levinson: Yeah, this is something actually we do a lot of work with schools about because yes, it is, I think, I have not yet met a school or a school leader or a set of educators who are not really wrestling with this.
There's a researcher, Diana Hess, the former dean of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She wrote a really wise book about now 20 years ago called Controversy in the Classroom, in which she wrote about something that she calls teaching in the tip, which she says is when issues, like, it can be hard enough to teach a controversial issue where people have very strong opinions on multiple sides about the issue. She said what makes it even harder is when there is disagreement about whether the issue should be controversial in the first place. And that's what she calls teaching in the tip, when something is tipping over from being what she calls open, like legitimately controversial, to being settled. Or tipping from being settled to being open.
And so you not only have disagreement about the issue itself, but you have disagreement about whether there should be, like whether it's legitimate to have disagreement about it.
Morva McDonald: Why are we disagreeing about this? It sounds like that sometimes. Like why is this, yeah.
Meira Levinson: Right, right. Yes. Why are we even talking about this, right?
So, you know, tax policy, we can all recognize that it's legitimate to have like, you can have reasonable different opinions about tax policy, even if I have a very, very, very strong opinion about tax policy. And I think you are totally wrong and totally misguided. I don't think that it's unreasonable to treat tax policy as a controversial issue where people may have different opinions, right?
On the flip side, enslavement of human beings is not something where we think there should be any treatment of that as controversial. We can certainly in our history classes teach about what kinds of justifications of enslavement were used. We can teach about the difference between chattel slavery and other forms of enslavement. You know, we can look at enslavement during the Greek period and you know, whatever in the Roman period, compare that to enslavement in the Americas, right? Like we can read John C. Calhoun. We can do all sorts of things to try to understand enslavement and practices of enslavement and justifications for enslavement, but we certainly are never trying to teach students that there are multiple reasonable perspectives about whether or not it's OK to enslave somebody, like right now in in 2026, right?
There are a huge number of topics in between those two extremes, right?
Morva McDonald: It's almost, it's like a policy discussion of sorts, right? Tax policy. But the second topic is fundamentally a moral question.
Meira Levinson: So no, I don't think that's the right way to distinguish it.
So tax policy, right, has tons of moral questions to it, right? Is taxation actually theft, right? I mean, you know, libertarians would classify taxation as theft of individual property. You know, somebody on the other side, right, might view taxation as the, you know, appropriate redistribution, right? Like, you know, there's whatever.
And enslavement is actually a policy, it can be a policy question, right? It was a policy question for actually a couple centuries. So take something like bathroom use, right? By students, non-gender conforming students. That is a policy question that has very strong normative, like, moral content to it, right, about whom do we, what does it mean to treat people with respect, what, how do we interpret scientific research, how do we show, how do we include students, how do we protect safety, right?
Virtually every meaningful policy question has a very strong moral component. And basically every moral decision can, has a policy, right? So what we do with students, with teachers, with school leaders, with board members, with parents, like we've had these conversations with all sorts, is make it clear there is no like clear, easy way to distinguish, to like say, Oh, OK, this is clearly open, that's clearly settled, right?
We have this thing that we call open/settled where, and we, again, we've done this with literally hundreds of groups. Parent-teacher associations, with students, with school boards and so forth, where we take a set of sort of propositions and say, you know, do you think that it would be legitimate to teach this as a controversial issue in your classroom or in your school or in your district or whatever? And oftentimes we'll have, you know, something and people will say, well, that's settled because we have a policy about that, right?
So say, you know, bathroom access for kids. No, that's a settled issue because we have a clear policy in our school, right? That, you know, bathroom use aligns with a kid's gender identity, for example, or whatever it is. And we'll say, OK. That's fine. How about the fact that it's not settled elsewhere? Like do you, like, which of these things do you think you should actually be treating as a controversial issue and having a conversation about, because it's not going to be settled in the next place that, you know, the kids are growing up to live in?
Morva McDonald: Is your advice, do you think, to educators who are often in this position, to start with the question of what makes something in our context open or not, controversial or not, right? How do we, how do we come to know that? Is that, is that a fair beginning place for people to be thinking about it?
Meira Levinson: Yeah, yeah, so yes, I think it is a fair beginning place. And actually we have resources about this on a website, valuesinteaching.org, that we created specifically to support educators who are trying to figure out how to teach in alignment with their values at a time of very quick values shift and lots of disagreement about it.
And yeah, I think it's important to start there for a couple of reasons. One is it can help the school community gain some clarity and you know, help you decide, OK, here's, here are our boundaries. Yes, we're agreed about this, and also highlight disagreement, you know, and so forth. It also then can help people recognize, oh, when there is disagreement about this, the fact of disagreement is OK. It's not a sign that we've like, messed up, right?
So this is really important to recognize, within every community there is actually going to be disagreement about, say, what should count as controversial and what shouldn't count as controversial. And that's also going to be true when you have disagreements, say, over whether it's OK to be discussing, you know, the inclusion of transgender athletes on, you know, athletic teams or whether you're discussing, say, extrajudicial bombings of boats off of the coast of Venezuela and Ecuador and so forth. It's a legitimate disagreement like to say, look, this is just out and out wrong and unconstitutional and a violation of international law and we should not be debating it. And, and have people saying we have to prepare our kids to be able to debate policy stances that our, their own government is taking and actions that they're taking in the world. Like if we just treat this as beyond the bounds of legitimate debate, then we are not preparing them as citizens, right?
Morva McDonald: I think this is a very important thing that you're after, which in some ways seems so simple, actually, but I think is is really deeply significant, which is a shift in the culture of communities and schools to see disagreement as an indication of its health, its healthiness, right? Rather than that everybody kind of complies to an idea, right, as an indication of its health.
And I think there is a big shift culturally here around that idea. Like there are, you know, Priya Parker’s just coming out with a book called The Art of Fighting. Right. And like really I think opening up the space again to actually disagreement, depending on how you go about disagreement, and we can talk about that. How you go about the disagreement is important. But the disagreement itself is an indication potentially of a healthier, right, community.
Meira Levinson: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
And then I'll say the other tool that we have found to be really useful in working with schools, and schools often use these. I mean, mostly this gets used by schools on their own without our involvement at all, is on our website, justiceinschools.org, we make available a huge number of
what I call normative case studies. Normative just means value laden or you know, right? And these are sort of case studies about ethical dilemmas regarding values as expressed through or in schools.
These are mostly like, a lot of them are fictional. They're like five pages long. We have readers' theater versions. We have like one page versions, like they're mostly, they’re narrative. They are written in order to help collectives of people have complex discussions with one another across lines of difference, about the hard ethical choices we face in education practice and policy.
And a bunch of the normative case studies on the website are about this very set of questions that we've been talking about. About how do we decide what we should treat as controversial? How should we teach controversial issues? What does it mean to be an inclusive or, you know, diverse school community? Actually also there are a bunch of cases on there thinking about the aims of education and how do we think about, like, you know, social inclusion versus academic learning that might be equitably, you know, distributed versus a certain idea of excellence or merit. And, you know, but these, they're designed to be able to be like read within 10 minutes or less and then immediately discussed by groups.
I think one of the, you had asked me at the very beginning like what got me into being interested in educational ethics, and 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.
And so what these case studies are designed to do is to help people start to have open conversation about the values trade-offs that we're making, and create a culture of sort of comfort with ethical complexity and with being able to articulate the ethical complexity of our work. So then we can make decisions together and we'll say, OK, well, you know, we talked about it. It was really, really, really hard. And we have decided to give up need blind admission for the following reasons. And you know, it hurts. But we are willing to do this for these other, you know, reasons, and we can stand behind that decision.
But we're not going to pretend that the decision was totally uncomplicated. And we are going to recognize that those who still are very upset that we've given up need blind admission or very upset, you know, that we've decided to let kids use AI for brainstorming or whatever. Like that there's ethical weight behind what they're saying, even if we've made a different decision.
Morva McDonald: I sometimes think of this as, having been a head of school, as the relationship between a dilemma. These are dilemmas, right? They have multiple things, multiple ways to go between the difference between a course of action that is viewed as the “right” course of action, versus a course of action that's a reasonable course of action, right?
Meira Levinson: I like that distinction. Yes. Yes.
Morva McDonald: That's the reason, that has a rationale behind it that you can make a case for, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the only course of action or even the right course of action.
I want to just talk a little bit with you about, because I think this is a space that many educators are struggling, is understanding and really being explicit about the space of disagreement that's productive and the space of disagreement that's harmful. And I'm wondering if you can tease those two things apart for us a little bit.
Meira Levinson: I mean this gets us back to this teaching in the tip and the open/settled distinction, right? The disagreement about what counts as legitimate disagreement and what is, counts as harm. That is in some ways another way of phrasing this disagreement about what should count as open versus settled, right?
So, you know, we actually have a case in our book, Democratic Discord in Schools, called Partisanship, Politics and Pedagogy. Fictional case of a 10th grade social studies team. So all of the sophomores in the school do this series of sort of power of persuasion speeches throughout the year. And there's this whole formal thing where like kids vote at the beginning before they hear the pop speeches about like, what they, where they stand on the issue, then they hear each other's pop talks, and then they vote at the end where they stand.
And the team, the social studies team is debating whether or not actually to treat the rights of transgender students, I think, I think over bathroom access actually, as a legitimate pop topic.
Morva McDonald: Pertinent, as a thing that many people are figuring out right now in schools.
Meira Levinson: Right, yeah. Many schools are trying to figure this out, right? So this gets to your question about safety and like that it's harmful to kids to have their very existence or rights be subject to, to question.
And then there's also like a pedagogical question about whether or not it should be, whether or not it should be debatable, should it be debated in this way? Right. And like we have a set of commentaries about the case afterwards in this book. And they all agree, even if this might be properly treated as a controversial issue that you could even have kids write persuasive essays about, no, you should not have kids standing up in an auditorium on this topic, given the kinds of identity threats and you know, so forth that you'll have some kids experiencing in the audience.
Morva McDonald: Such an important tension, right? In the controversy, the tension of having something be open and the potential harm that the fact that it's become controversial does to an individual, right? That an individual feels, right? And that's a tension that teachers for sure in schools are juggling, you know—
Meira Levinson: —Yeah, and I do want to give some examples on the other side, right? Like I think it's really important to recognize this is not just a question of like the left claiming harm, right? There are also claims by the right of harm for treating certain things as open, like right. I mean, so again, sticking with gender identity, right? But also like around, you know, teaching about sex, teaching, exposing kids…There, like there's a bunch of concerns. There, there are concerns actually around, around abortion, around war.
I actually wrote in No Citizen Left Behind about questions about like, you know, as you have kids like doing a civic action project against a war, what is the impact, and especially if they're condemning the war as immoral, or condemning, say, the actions of armed forces as immoral, what is the effect on a kid whose brother or sister or, you know, mother or father are actually in the armed forces, you know, deployed at that time? Like right, that the certain kinds of identity questions and identity challenges can be felt, like it's not confined to one side of the political spectrum.
Morva McDonald: Right. It's, it's a, it can be impactful, right, regardless of your political position or positionality related to a topic. And I think that's, it's good for us to attend to.
In closing, I'm just, I'd love to hear from you a little bit about if you could just redesign one aspect of how schools prepare young people for civic life, what would you redesign? What would you center?
Meira Levinson: I…so I'm going to propose something that I think is like, truly doable, so it's not going to be utterly radical, but I do think it would, it could make a big difference.
Have some opportunity for students in a complex democratic way to actually control money in their schools, for a purpose other than entertainment or an event. So it's true that some schools give kids, you know, a budget for like the school dances or whatever.
Morva McDonald: Spirit Week.
Meira Levinson: And that's actually an important, yeah, spirit week, whatever. That's important learning. But like participatory budgeting or you know, students have the opportunity to work with teachers to think about the curriculum and collectively allocate twenty thousand dollars. Like, you know, something that feels really real.
Morva McDonald: I mean money and resources are power, right?
Meira Levinson: Yes, they are right, exactly. That is really power.
You know, if you don't have that money, another way to do some of the same thing is to include students in decision-making bodies within the school. So you have the teacher working group that's reviewing the curriculum for the year and thinking about, you know, how are we educating for civic responsibility or, you know, is our math curriculum, do we, are we going to change it and whatever.
Morva McDonald: What to do about AI?
Meira Levinson: What to do about AI, right. Include students as real members on those committees. If you're, you know, you're hiring a new assistant head and you have a hiring committee and you have students on that hiring committee.
So, yes, ways… there are lots of ways in which you can give students a real authentic experience of power and responsibility that is also bounded, right? Because that's important too, right? The budget is say only ten or twenty thousand dollars. So it's real money, right?
Morva McDonald: There are real constraints.
Meira Levinson: But you know, that's all they get, right? Or they are on this committee, but you know, you there are two students and there are ten, you know, other community members. So it's not like they are going to, you know, have full power. That's, that's what I would propose.
Morva McDonald: I think every educator that has just listened to you is going to appreciate your ability to draw us from relatively big, complicated concepts to something as tangible as like, here's a thing you ought to try or think about in the context of your school. So I greatly appreciate that as both a person who works with leaders in schools and as a practitioner myself, the balance of the big ideas, the big concepts, the big things we're trying to do, and something very practical because in the end, teachers have to show up on Monday morning and figure out what to do with students. And so it's been great, Meira, to talk with you. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.
Meira Levinson: Thanks so much for having me.