Amy H-L: [00:00:15] Hi, I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
Jon M: [00:00:17] And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guest today is Dr. Michelle Fine. Michelle is Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies, American Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York () CUNY.) Welcome, Michelle.
Michelle F: [00:00:32] Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Happy Juneteenth.
Amy H-L: [00:00:37] Michelle, the pandemic, in conjunction with the Movement for Black Lives, has really laid bare the largely race-based inequities in all our civic institutions. And, of course, nowhere is this more apparent than in our school systems. Some stakeholders, including the students we interviewed last week at The Beacon School, are demanding fundamental changes in their own schools’ admissions policies, curricula, and student services. How does this tie in with the Movement for Black Lives?
Michelle F: [00:01:11] Yeah, I think the Movement for Black Lives has been foundational for a number of years, and calling for an accountability by public and private institutions and the political economy and legitimate political office to address enormous disparities, historic disparities, and to transform the institutions that you and I have taken maybe for granted that reproduce white supremacy. And I think that there’s a bifocal view. One is on violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, structural violence, state violence. But the other, which I think has gotten less attention, is the unwarranted privilege that wealthy people and particularly White people have accumulated across generations. And we see both of those dynamics in schools.
Jon M: [00:02:18] Do you want to expand a little bit when you’re talking about the privilege of White supremacy?
Michelle F: [00:02:24] Sure. You know, I think if we did a deep dive, let’s take New York City schools, the entire choice system rests on white privilege. It rests on who does well on test scores, who has parents who can afford to get their kids into the best schools, who has transportation, who’s teaching in those schools, who has access to rigorous coursework, who has access to alternatives to disciplinary procedures, who is centered in the curriculum, who has access to college-going network, and who has access, of course, to private tutoring, all of those elements. Our everyday elements of what it means to be a White family in New York City, the playing the system to make sure you get in the school that you want, having the connections, having consultants get you into the right pre-K to get into the right kindergarten, doing well enough on whatever tests there are to get into selective high schools. So we have created a system that looks like it’s merit-based, that is lathered in White privilege and class privilege, frankly. And we have tests and hiring practices and curriculum and discipline practices and special ed practices that are deeply racialized in ways that we have now been called to account for.
Jon M: [00:04:02] So fitting in with that exactly, low income Black and Latinx students are likely to have a harder time getting into the colleges of their choice. You’ve been working on a study of a pilot collaboration between CUNY and the New York Performance Standards Consortium to change how CUNY assesses college readiness in accepting students. Could you start by describing how CUNY admissions work now and how the process tends to exacerbate inequities?
Michelle F: [00:04:28] Sure. I need to say that I love working at CUNY, City University of New York, which aspires to be the university for all of the children of the City of New York, and many of us, staff, faculty, and students, work hard to keep CUNY accountable to its mission of justice. CUNY, like most educational systems, is tiered. So there are community colleges, there are four year colleges, there are more senior four year colleges, and then there’s the Graduate Center. And the higher up that hierarchy that I go, the more the students and the faculty are white and relatively privileged. It was once the case that CUNY was open admissions and tuition free, where it exhibited the richest form of being a social justice higher education institution for all of the children of New York. That’s when Audre Lorde and June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara and Adrienne Rich were teaching composition at John Jay College. It was a very vibrant time where there was a lot of activism by Black and Puerto Rican students.
And then at some point, CUNY decided that it was time for CUNY to be “the Harvard of New York” and to get more rigorous in our admission standards. And so we stopped having open admissions. We stopped having a tuition free system.
And then in 2008, when we had the financial crisis, unfortunately and quietly, CUNY altered its admission standards for the elite four year colleges, so that students had to score a 500 on their SAT, separately, the math and the language arts. And in practice and in consequence, that meant that many New York City-educated Back and Latinx students, who in the past had gotten into Hunter or City College or Brooklyn College or Queens or Lehman were no longer being admitted into those schools and were being sent to the community colleges.
Does that history make sense? Should I keep going? I’ll keep going. Okay. So it used to be that there was open admissions. Then there was a moment where CUNY kind of closed ranks. And after the financial crisis, many students who had been in private colleges transferred into the State University system. Many of the State University kids transferred back home to CUNY because their families didn’t have as much money as they had before the crisis. And as a consequences of that our four year schools got Whiter and wealthier and Black and Latinx kids were more likely to be sent to the community colleges.
Three things happened at once. One is that educators from a network of schools called the Consortium, which I will detail in a moment, those educators were looking at where are our kids getting into college? And they were noticing that their Black and Latino/Latina/Latinx students were getting into private SAT-optional schools like Sarah Lawrence and Trinity and Wesleyan and Connecticut College, but were not getting into the CUNY four year colleges, which was a huge surprise to these college counselors. People in New York City rely on the CUNY system to be a loving multi-racial, local, community, college option if they don’t want to go out of the city. So kids were getting into these more elite private schools and not getting into the four years. So on the one hand, there was consternation among those counselors. On the second hand, the Community Service Society, led by David Jones, put out a bold report, exposing CUNY for having changed its admissions requirements and exposing the deeply racialized disparities that emerged as a consequence of that. On the third hand, if we’re allowed to have three hands, some folks within CUNY were concerned about the growing lack of equity and access to the four year colleges.
So a pilot was born out of this concern. The Consortium schools, which I will define in a moment, worked with CUNY so that young people who came out of those schools who did not score at the 500 SAT cut-off, who had been vetted by their schools, highly recommended by their educators, would in fact, get into the four year colleges and that we, myself and colleagues at the Public Science Project, in exchange for open more open access, would conduct a study to reveal with transparency how did these young people fare.
So let me step back. The Consortium schools are 38 schools in New York City. They’re public schools. They’re for the most part non-selective schools where young people do not, for the most part, take the five Regents that are required to graduate high school in New York. They only take the language arts. And instead they engage a series of what are callled Performance Based Assessment Tasks in order to graduate. These are student designed projects in English, math, science, history and maybe community engagement or ethics. Students craft a question. For at least a year, they work with educators to scaffold their responses to that question. They produce a final written product in English, math, social studies, science, and usually one other. And then they present that to a panel of external evaluators, teachers, university professors, scientists, politicians, lawyers, activists. By so doing, students have spent at least a year pursuing a student question, developed with educators, and then evaluated externally. And on those external reviews, students are given a lot of feedback from these outsiders and are often asked to revise their final work and then come back and present it again. In order to graduate from the 38 Consortium schools, young people have to satisfy these performance assessments.
You with me? So the kids who go to Consortium schools tend to be Blacker, more Latinx, poorer, or more likely to be from the Bronx, more likely to have a disability, more likely to be in economic need, more likely to be housed precariously, and enter high school with lower than average standardized test scores than New York City.
When they graduate, these schools tend to have a 90% college readiness score. The students’ GPAs are much higher coming out than coming in. And a much broader range of students are going to college. And the racial and economic gaps on college-going are narrowed. So these schools themselves are building in students a kind of muscle for critical inquiry for writing, for presenting their work orally, for using original sources, for seeking feedback and revising their work.
So we ran this pilot. We’ve run it now over three years where a cohort of Consortium kids get into CUNY below the 500 cut-off score. Meanwhile, a lot of Consortium kids get into CUNY above the 500 cut-off. But what we were doing is basically running a pilot that said, can we build a rigorous assessment system in high school that will prepare young people to be critical thinkers, writers, and presenters, and can we demonstrate that that is a better predictor of their persistence in graduation from college? And so what we’ve been doing is tracking cohorts of young people. And thus far, we’ve been able to demonstrate that kids who come in below the 500 do as well or better than their CUNY peers, particularly African-American males. African-American males who were coming into these schools with performance assessment rooted in inquiry, scaffolded by teachers, and performed and evaluated externally, are far surpassing African-American males who are just coming out of test-driven schools, when we look at college going and college persistence. Does that make sense?
Jon M: [00:14:28] Yes. And it seems, I mean, the answers seem clear, but if you would just want to speak for a minute. Why are Performance Based Assessment Tasks such a much better indicator of a student’s capacities than an SAT or a Regents test or the other kinds of standardized tests that have been the mainstay of, you know, exit assessments for so long? What is it that standardized tests don’t do that the Performance Based Assessments do do well?
Michelle F: [00:15:01] Let me just say that the only good thing I can say about COVID, other than pollution getting a little worse, is that most universities have done away with SATs and GREs and high stakes exit exams from high school. So we have a moment now to reimagine assessment and accountability in a way that’s ethical, in a way that a racially equitable, and in a way that doesn’t privilege White students or students whose parents can pay for SAT prep or taking the tests multiple times. You need to know, as I think you do, that about 1100 private universities no longer require the SATs or the ACTs.
So what we have is a system of elite private schools where elite kids can get in without a test that we know to be stratified by race and class, and then public university systems are still using old fashioned, demonstrated as inequitable, entrance criteria like SATs, ACTs, or Regents scores. There’s substantial evidence that, let’s just take the SAT, does not predict college persistence or college grade point average. There’s substantial evidence that White and wealthy students are much more likely to have SAT prep and to take the test multiple times. There’s substantial evidence that wealthy students, disproportionately White students with disabilities, and again, I think this was a good thing, can take the test. with unlimited time, but kids whose families can’t afford a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a testing process that will have them so designated are taking the test once, often from under-preparing schools, without SAT prep, without extended time. And they’re being measured on college admissions on a test we know to be inequitable, non predictive, and privileging White kids over kids of color. So that’s what’s wrong with testing.
Let me say what’s good about performance assessment tasks. There are two ways to think about performance assessment right now. A lot of places are saying we’re interested in performance assessment, which just means that they’re interested in enabling students to present research papers or science projects or jazz performances in their admission packet. That’s performance assessment. And I think that’s a great thing.
What’s happening at the Consortium schools, again, this is 38 schools, is that the entire high school culture is organized around discipline-based student inquiry, teachers scaffold and curriculum around that inquiry, cultures of feedback and revision, and then external accountability. So the assessment in those schools is part of a larger culture that recognizes the various forms of intellect, various forms of confidence and lack of confidence, complex questions that young people are capable of pursuing. These are often schools that don’t have tracking. That have more democratic governance by educators and students. These are schools that are holistic in supporting students’ mental health issues, social issues, as well as their academic issues. These are schools that take political education seriously as part of students. So there’s a culture of intellectual engagement in these schools, which is so rich and beautiful, particularly given the students are coming in at a social and economic and sometimes an academic disadvantage.
Does that make sense? Because right now, a lot of places are saying we want performance assessment and we’ll have a standardized performance task, which just means like an essay, not an SAT. These schools are organized around deep inquiry. And if you go online to the Performance Standards Consortium, for educators that are listening or activists who are listening, there are serious rubrics on how educators assess student work as poor, good, competent, excellent in terms of the content, the analysis, the presentation, the written performance, the oral performance. There are moderation studies among educators on these schools where they’re refining these rubrics and looking at student work. So this isn’t just teachers having a student project and then grading their students well. This is a serious intellectual and ethical project around how do we create schools that honor inquiry, creativity, and recognize the deep inequities within which our students are living.
Amy H-L: [00:20:42] If, in fact, this sort of much more ethical admissions process were to be adopted city-wide, it seems that more students, especially Black and Latinx students, would get into the CUNY four year colleges. Is CUNY prepared to increase its capacity to accommodate them?
Michelle F: [00:21:04] So it’s, it’s quite beautiful. There was, we’re writing this up for Linda Darling-Hammond’s Institute and we did a webinar, and on it Joanna Kucharski, who heads admissions at CUNY, was on with me and she was talking about–CUNY knows the Consortium schools for 25, 30 years, because these are beautiful schools around the city and they send a lot of students to CUNY, but they hadn’t received the feedback in the past, right. Because we only submit the PBATs because they’re under the 500 SAT cut-off, and Joanna talked about how gorgeous it was to sit around with the admissions counselors and read student work and read teacher comments on how a student went from “Were the Negro Leagues really good for Black people. Like there were so many more Black baseball players when we had the Negro Leagues than when we quote integrated. Does integration serve Black people?” Right. So starting with the small question and then going bold, they felt like they met the students in reading these. And does it take more time? Yes.
You’re running a podcast on ethical practices. Ethical practices take longer than technical practices, but they build a fabric of democratic, multiracial, anti-racist possibility. Yes, of course it takes more time. So we should. In the same way that we’re talking about defunding the NYPD and moving it into communities, we should defund the testing infrastructure and take those resources and move it into admissions and student support. And yes, we will have too many beautiful students to figure out whom do we admit, but what a lovely problem to have rather than our schools reproducing the race and class stratification that exists around us. We don’t need schools to reproduce racial and class and economic stratification. The political economy does that really well. We need schools to transform those opportunities. And also those, if we’ve learned anything during the uprisings, is that like White people have a lot to learn. And people of color have a lot to teach us. And our schools have to be a place where all of those knowledges are at the center. It can’t be that we’re inviting kids of color into White-ish schools to become us. Those days are over. If integration means assimilation, that’s not what anybody signed up for. So the performance assessment schools, they are about assessment and accountability and college-going, but they’re also about building cultures of intellect and ethics and multiracial possibilities. And those young people, when we have followed them into college, they say three things. They say, “How come my roommate’s so freaked out about writing a paper. I know how to write a paper.” They say “How come college teaching is so awful compared to the teaching that I’ve had in my high school.” And they say, you know, “When I get critical feedback from a faculty member in college, I know how to revise. I know how to get more feedback.” And I, Michelle, know that a lot of working class and poor kids get to college, they get the first bad grade and they’re like, “I’m out of here. I don’t belong here. Anyway, my mom’s sick. My little brother needs me.” And the Consortium students know how to find an adult to help them. And they know how to take feedback and revise on the basis of that. That’s an incredible lost skill in a testing culture.
Jon M: [00:25:26] You’ve talked about revision, both right now and also a lot in the past. Can you talk a little bit about why that’s so central to the Consortium process and why you think it’s so valuable to students to learn how to revise and to think in terms of revising?
Michelle F: [00:25:41] Yeah, I guess I want to say two things. One is my old friend Paulo Freire helped us understand that there’s the banking model of education, where you chop somebody off at the forehead and you pour stuff in their brain and a more generative model of pedagogy that invites people to discover their own desires, their own interests, their own capacities and their own needs, right. The Consortium schools are not banking model schools. They are using a kind of critical pedagogy where young people are moved by their own questions, but then invited into a broader world of knowledge, of history, of experience, of expertise. And they are asked to weave their own desires with that larger world. And so they learn how to search out knowledge, points of view, experiences, perspectives that they might disagree with. They then turn to educators who give them a lot of feedback on content, on sources, on plagiarism. And might you consider another point of view and writing and they take that and they understand that their craft is to refine the work that they’re working on. Like there’s a pride in these performances at the end because they’re like artists, you know, they brought a piece of work. I’d been on these panels. I invite any viewers who want to contact me, I can set you up to come to these panels. And I’ve been on panels where, you know, these neighborhood kids, low income kids, adorable kids who have struggled through so much, present brilliant papers on Vietnam War from four points of view. And I’ve been on panels where people say, “That was just spectacular. Congratulations!” And I’ve been on panels where people say, “you know what, Amy, this is going to be great, but it’s not there yet. There were three sites that you still need to include, and you need to do a better job of thinking about how your experiment confirms or disconfirms the experiments of the three scientists that you spoke of earlier.” And kids don’t run out and say, “Oh my God, I failed.” They take that information and they improve their practice.
I think, if I can make an analogy to the current moment, like as White people we are learning a lot about our own epistemologies of ignorance. What we did not know. What we did not know about history, what we did not know about policing, what we did not know about the ease with which people call the cops on black kids, what we did not know about White nationalists, what we did not know about how our words land. And if we are incapable of revising, reflecting, repairing, we’re in deep trouble. And so I actually think this notion of revision without defensiveness is crucial. And I’m watching a lot of people be very defensive these days, and focus on the violent protesters or focus on…and not porous to this moment, what Arundhati Roy called the pandemic as a portal, a way of releasing the past and reimagining, that revision, that’s transformation. And again, if we’ve learned nothing else from COVID, it’s like nothing is predictable. So we may as well recognize that we’re all deeply vulnerable. Some of us have paid a much harsher price than others, but all we’ve got is the possibility of solidarity, revision and radical transformation of the systems that are killing us and by which we are killing each other. And so I guess I feel almost like spiritual about revision at this point. Like we all better take a pause, especially those of us who have benefited from systems. And think through how might it be otherwise? What will universities look like? What will schools look like? And certainly, what will assessment look like? And we have known about the SAT and the ACT. Nobody thought it was a coincidence that White kids or wealthy kids did better. No, nobody thought that. And yet we persisted in the process as if that were the case.
And so I think the gig’s up. And now with performance assessment, we have one way of thinking about an alternative. There are lots of ways to think about alternatives. There’s the International Baccalaureate. There’s, you know, how international students get into our schools. There’s how kids from yeshivas get into higher education. There are lots of back doors in higher ed. It’s not like the SAT has been the only door, but it has been the only door for kids of color. And we know about the abuses of legacy in elite universities and money. So there have been a million back doors. So I don’t want to hear a performance assessment is a back door. There are a lot of doors into higher ed. Money, Whiteness, wealth, connections, but for kids of color, they had to go through the main gate and, and there was a gatekeeper. And the gig’,s up.
Amy H-L: [00:31:42] Well, I think we’re all hopeful that this pause is only the first step, that it leads to action.
Michelle F: [00:31:49] That’s our work, Amy.That’s why we can’t retire. And why we have to step aside and let people of color lead. But yes, we need to keep whatever little doors we have open, we need to keep those open.
Amy H-L: [00:32:04] So in terms of racial and economic equity, why is it so important that the collaboration opens up access to the four year CUNY schools rather than the two year schools?
Michelle F: [00:32:17] You know, it’s interesting. I love the two year schools, and I love them for all the ways they are open arms to immigrants, to first gen, to folks who have had four kids and decided to come back to school, to English language learners. But the graduation rates are very low. You know, 12% to 25%. And again, there’s a million reasons. Not everybody’s going to community college to get a degree, but the four year design, which is often six years with working class and working people, has a deeper structure so that students can kind of move through. If you go to the community college, then you have to transfer into a new school. Every transition leads to loss and another hurdle. And the four years are somewhat more prestigious. And I don’t love buying into that, but it matters. And if we’re going to have a stratified system, we better have equitable ramps for getting in and not racialized and class ramps for getting in.
Jon M: [00:33:35] So how could the State and the City Departments of Education enable the Consortium to expand to include many more schools without watering down its essential elements.?
Michelle F: [00:33:50] Yeah. So there, there are two or three different ways to think about it. One is we should take this moment and get rid of the Regents because New York State is one of only 11 states that still have a high stakes exam required for graduation. So that’s 11 out of 50. So we should say thank you, retire their number. Then one strategy is, as you suggest, Jon, to expand the Consortium. But another strategy would be to invite districts and schools and networks of schools to generate transparent alternatives for how we’re assessing student learning and do what we did. Let’s take a risk, which allowing these kids below 500 was considered a risk. And let’s do a piece of research. Let’s look at the work. Let’s look at how well they’re doing in college. And so we did a predictive validity study, but I can imagine upstate, rural schools, nature-based schools developing a whole other kind of assessment system that would be aligned with state standards, be student focused, teacher developed, and externally validated, and there might be different kinds of consortia around the state, right. I think art and music schools have a different way of thinking about what does it take to graduate from our schools. So imagine if we really opened that up with creativity, holding the standards, holding some kind of external validation, but also relying on the professionalism and integrity of the educators in those schools to build the assessments. So you could open the, the Consortium up. And I think the Consortium would like that. But I also think we could multiply this. In California, I know Linda Darling-Hammond and folks are working on performance assessment consortiums out there. It’ll take a different form than the New York ones. Do I love the idea of bottom up assessment systems that are responsive to standards, but not dictated by a top down privatized corporate tests that satisfy some fantasy of rigor when we know it just maps onto race and class.
Jon M: [00:36:34] I mean, what you’re saying obviously makes enormous sense. A question I would have is how do we get there in terms of, you’re really talking about, as the Consortium has been, revolutionizing how we look at the purposes of education and what it’s all about. So, how do you see that happening? Do you see the initiative at this point coming from students? Do you see the impact of the Mobilization for Black Lives spreading into schools? Do you see a mass movement among teachers or teacher educators demanding these kinds of changes? What’s your sense of what’s what’s next?
Michelle F: [00:37:19] So there is a campaign on right now in New York City. Advocates for Children, the Consortium, there’s something called the Diploma Project, mobilizing to say let’s use this moment to get rid of the Regents, just like in New Jersey, where I live, trying to get rid of the high stakes graduation assessment. So that’s one piece of it.
There has been the civil rights movement community, compared to Black lives Matter, have had some differing points of view. Some civil rights leaders have starkly supported high stakes testing because it’s been a way to demonstrate inequities. And the fear is that in the absence of high stakes exam, expectations will go down and accountability will go down. Does that make sense? And so older civil rights folks have often held on to testing and then younger folks are like, get rid of the cops, get rid of the tests. Let’s have a Black lives curriculum. I think it would be fantastic for us to have the student movements. Teachers had been fighting high stakes testing. The problem is we’ve got federal government that’s insisting on ESSA and… but there’s a substantial group of educators and unions fighting for sampling students, so that, you know, 10% of students around the country take these tests and then we can hold the districts accountable, but not the kids. So decouple the assessment. We can still decouple the assessment from the individual child, remove the stakes from the head of the child. I would support that. Like NAEP, you know, NAEP does that. And so we know we know how kids do across the country, but right now, because it’s attached to school child, the possibility of school closing, and then in places like New York, getting into a high school that you want. It’s so embroidered at every level that it’s very hard to disentangle it. So if they said we’re going to have two years to reimagine assessment, we would like schools, we would like communities, we would like networks of schools to generate accountability systems that work for you, assessment systems that we can also use to know, how are you doing.
I talked to you about working with transfer schools, and these are schools for kids who have had a really hard time. Holding them accountable for a 67% graduation rate is nuts, threatening to close them on the basis of that. This is racist, unethical and traumatizing, right. We’re now starting a conversation among transfer schools saying how should we hold ourselves accountable? What would we look at? I think rural schools, upstate New York, would have a whole other set of projects that they would want young people to participate in, environmental climate issues and land issues and local history.
It would also be a way to reinvigorate the intellectual lives of teachers. Right now that a lot of teachers can’t even imagine what I’m talking about. They’ve been trained on high stakes testing. Professional development is reading Excel spreadsheets and then sorting kids on the basis. It just breaks my heart. These young teachers, like when I talk about performance assessment, they think it’s a private school. They can’t imagine this happens in the public sphere, particularly for kids who have been most disadvantaged.
So I don’t think it would be hard for us to say let’s open it up. In the interim we’re going to do, you know, to keep our finger on the checker we’re going to do 25% or 20% testing, and we’ll just have the data, but we’re not going to close any schools, all right. We’ve got five years. We’re not closing schools. We’re not denying anybody a diploma. And you’ve got five years to generate an assessment system in your school, across schools, and their network in your region. I think people would come up with beautiful stuff. I know teachers.
You and I, and maybe Amy, you too. We’ve lived through times where groups of teachers created incredible, incredible work, incredible schools for some of the most disadvantaged kids. These were not Walden schools, which were wonderful. But these were, you know, the 1980s. The small schools in New York started . . . Aaron Diamond, the Diamond Foundation. And so all the small schools educated, and these were poor kids, mostly kids of color. And we would have what we called loft talk. Somebody had a loft. They asked me to facilitate. All I did was bring the wine. And it was groups of teachers talking about what is and what could be if we don’t track, if we don’t segregate, if we don’t test, if we don’t expel. What are we going to put in place? How do I get a kid reading on the second grade level in 10th grade, working at his or her capacity? There were beautiful, beautiful conversations about practice and possibility. I don’t see much of that. I see it happening in the Consortium schools. I see groups of teachers outside schools. I don’t see that culture in most schools. And we better bring some oxygen into those places.
Jon M: [00:43:31] And since you mentioned possibility, I just want to mention that people may enjoy reading the late Jean Anyon’s “Radical Possibilities.” So thank you, Michelle Fine of the CUNY Grad Center.
Michelle F: [00:43:44] A pleasure.
Amy H-L: [00:43:45] And thank you, listeners. If you liked this episode, please consider subscribing and giving us a rating or review. This helps other people to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and articles and subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. We work with consultants to offer customized SEL programs with a focus on ethics for schools and youth programs in the New York City area. Contact us at [email protected]. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at ethical schools, our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Till next week.