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. We’re happy to have Lev Moscow back with us today. Lev teaches history and economics at The Beacon School, a public high school in Manhattan. He’s the host of acorrectionpodcast, a podcast focused on making economics accessible. And he is my son. Welcome, Lev.
Lev M: [00:00:37] Really great to be here.
Amy H-L: [00:00:39] Lev, we’ve spoken with you before about why and how you teach history. Why teach economics?
I really enjoy teaching economics. I think that it needs to be demystified. The language, the vocabulary of economics, is really intimidating for a lot of people. Many people think of economics as mostly math or as just like physics. It’s math-heavy and I didn’t know and, I think, most people don’t know that it had its roots in philosophy. And the early economists thought of themselves as philosophers. So there’s a wonderful Heilbroner book, Robert Heilbroner book, called “The Worldly Philosophers,” where they give bios and explanations of the theories of important philosophers, philosophers from the last four centuries. So, yeah, I think it’s really important that people don’t feel intimidated by economics because so much of the newspaper is filled with economic content. And people, I think, struggle to understand what it’s about, but it’s really important, obviously. So I try in my classes and also through the podcast, acorrection, to demystify it and to get young people really comfortable with the terms, translate the terms into plain English so that they feel part of the conversation and maybe more important, they feel like they can change the conversation. And, you know, as Marx said, change the world.
Jon M: [00:02:25] This morning, I was listening as you were teaching a class on Zoom. You were asking students some interesting questions. Could you talk about the lesson?
Lev M: [00:02:35] Yeah. So today’s lesson was…so the first couple of weeks of the course, of the political economy course, and we’re still in just the third week here, I’m really trying to lay out…it’s a heterodox approach to economics, and I’m really trying to lay out, sort of, three major currents of economics. So politically, I mean, we start with neoclassical and we discuss the key tenants of characteristics for the first few days, the key theories. And then we move on to Keynesianism. And then we move on to radical economics and we spend a few days on radical economics. Today was something different. Sort of, I was saying, and then the fourth stream or current is behavioral economics, which is relatively new and it kind of sits right squarely between conservative and Keynesian economics. And it marries economics and psychology.
But today was about another way to think of markets. And there’s a wonderful book called “What Money Can’t Buy” by Michael Sandel, who’s at Harvard, He’s a philosopher and he talks about the benefits of markets, but also the the limitations of markets and he starts from the premise that markets mostly work and that most of the time people, you know, if you think about the theory of utilitarianism, markets make both parties happy, right. So if I go to a store and I buy an egg sandwich from the deli for $2, I’m really happy that I got the egg sandwich and the deli owner’s really happy they got my $2. So both sides are happy from the transaction, but what Sandel says, and I think this is relevant for ethical schools is sometimes markets can corrupt. The thing that’s being exchanged on the market, so it doesn’t corrupt you and I, but it corrupts. And for example, if it’s a market for egg sandwiches, it doesn’t corrupt the egg sandwich, but, for example, and so what I was doing in class was, was giving kids some examples and asking them whether or not they thought this thing should be traded on the market. So, you know, maybe we start with, um, should women be paid to be surrogate mothers, then you talk about that. And most kids, most kids in the class, said yes. And then how about, should people be paid for donating sperm, and most people said yes. And then, so how about selling your baby? Should should people be able to sell their babies if they want to?. And of course, you know, nobody thinks that’s okay. In China, when there was a one child policy, as far as I understand it, and the way he describes it is that you’d have these coupons basically, or you’d have a voucher and you’d have one voucher and I’d have one voucher. And oftentimes there was a black market for the vouchers, so that if I didn’t have much money and I didn’t really want a kid or I wanted a kid, but I wanted the money more, I could sell you my voucher and you could have two children. And he asks is this an okay market or does it this corrupt? Does this corrupt parenthood?
And then we move on to markets for, for sex, for example. So prostitution and most of the kids are actually, at this point, okay for that market. They don’t think it corrupts love or love-making.
Amy H-L: [00:05:59] I have to interrupt for a second. What do you mean by corrupt?
Lev M: [00:06:04] Yeah, it’s a really good question. So think about it in the way of like a bridge where there’s lots of rust on the bridge and it corrodes the integrity of the bridge. So it changes the thing itself and makes the thing weaker or less, but it’s a really good question, Amy. So, yes. So does prostitution, a market for sex, corrupt love or love-making and then, you know, I think again, most of the kids are right now are saying, at least in the school. I’m in, yeah, that’s fine. Prostitution’s fine. Well, how about a market for hugs or kissing, which seems a lot stranger to kids. There are markets, in fact, for hugs, and the kids see very clearly that that’s corrupting the act of giving a hug. Um, we can talk about whether or not, you know…
Jon M: [00:06:52] [Inaudible] these markets for hugs?
Lev M: [00:06:54] So for example, in Japan, there’s a robust market for hugs, where you have a lot of lonely people. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have it here too. But a lot of lonely people who, who want a hug, and so want hugs for 10 minutes. And so a market has emerged.
And so what this is obviously really, really getting at is, you know, the ethics of certain markets. And you have people who are, what I would say, extremist, I don’t mean that in a negative way, who say, basically, markets don’t make moral judgments, and that’s one of the things that makes markets good. It makes markets great, they allow us to be free. And we should want, in the interest of freedom, more markets always.
And other people say, nope, you know, sometimes we might want to limit markets because of, because of the corruption factor. Some other things we could look at, one other example we gave, and I don’t, I don’t want to go into too many more examples because I think you sort of have the point, but another example was you have a poor school without much funding. The kids have never had a football field and Nike comes along and says, we will build you a football stadium. We’re going to brand it Nike. Is that okay? And you know, a lot of the kids say yes. Like if the schools don’t have the resources, then it’s okay to have a branded stadium. Well, okay. How about if my classroom at school , if Goldman Sachs said we’re gonna build you a brand new school, but the econ classes, when you walk in, it says, this is the Goldman Sachs econ class, you know, is that okay? And then of course the kids are like, no, no way. Because we were afraid that, you know, you might not be critical of the, of the financial system then.
Jon M: [00:08:31] Interestingly, you have that with professorships at a college. We have the so and so endowed chair of something or other, and especially in things like economics, you know, you could have the Koch Brothers Chair of something or other, and then the person who’s in that position is in the strange position.
I have a question. Your course is called international political economy. What’s the difference between teaching political economy and teaching economics?
Lev M: [00:09:05] Yeah, I think it’s to go back to that point about economics being social science. And I think it’s really important. When I define economics with the kids, obviously there’s lots of definitions, but one is to talk about it as a social science concerned with the way that people choose to divide up the, you know, the goods and resources that are scarce. And I think what’s important about that is that there’s human choice there, that there’s nothing natural about capitalism. There’s nothing natural about socialism. These are human-made systems and we can choose to live in a different way. And I think that’s really important because, you know, I, I can’t remember who said it’s a famous quote, but it’s sort of like, we can imagine more easily the end of the world right now than the end of capitalism, because it feels so much like it’s always been here and it always will be. But I think it’s really important that we get over that because well, the end of the world is not coming, but the end of life on earth is coming. It’s not a maybe. We’re on that path. And so I think we have the moral, ethical obligation to tell kids that there are alternatives.
And I think one of the great victories of Thatcherism is TINA, right? I mean, so she famously said there is no alternative.
Jon M: [00:10:27] Tha would be Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, the former prime minister of Great Britain.
Lev M: [00:10:32] Right. The conservative former prime minister of Great Britain. And maybe John Major said it or maybe Thatcher herself. You know, Major comes after her. He’s also conservative. But it’s that, you know, looking at the Blair administration, Blair, who was New Labor, that Blair was the greatest victory of Thatcherism because Blair took her ideas and adopted them enthusiastically. So even the ostensible, the so-called left, the ostensible left, has really, I think, swallowed a lot of these conservative ideas, hook, line, and sinker. And the most important, you know, I think, is that there isn’t an alternative anymore.
And so I think that calling it political economy is to stress the fact that it’s a social science. It’s not a math. There are numbers, but we can debate, for example, we can debate interest rates that the Fed sets. And they are not objectively good or bad, but they are political decisions. Or when we talk about the unemployment rate, you know, let’s say the unemployment rate is sitting at 3.5%. Is that good or bad? Well, that’s a political question. And one of the things that we were speaking about earlier, Jon, is that when we talk about politics, I think of politics as morality lived publicly. And so it’s public morality, public ethics. And so again, I want to stress, and, and this is important, I try as much as possible, thinking about the heterodox approach, to give kids, normally, three different perspectives for every topic we do, which would be the radical, the conservative and the Keynesian. And sometimes four, with the libertarian, paternalist, or behavioral economics perspective. So I’m not trying to tell the kids what is right, but I am trying to tell them that it is okay, that numbers, as you know, don’t speak for themselves. I think that’s a really important part of the course.
Amy H-L: [00:12:34] The concept of ever increasing growth is baked into the economies of the developed world. Would you discuss some of the consequences of growth as primary metric of, you know, what’s a healthy economy. And how can we change that?
Lev M: [00:12:53] So, yeah, I think that relying on GDP as, I mean, GDP does tell us things. It’s an important indicator, but when we talk about what’s the state of the economy, I generally start off with, okay, well, what’s the GDP. And then we look at, you know, we look at inflation and we look at it, but we start with GDP and we do it. I think it’s important too, to know what GDP growth was this year and to know what overall GDP is, to know what GDP per capita is. But I also think then the responsibility of an economics teacher is to talk about the limitations of using GDP. And there are lots of limitations. I think first and foremost, GDP does not take into account the what of what we’re producing.
So one of the things I give the kids is this Congressional testimony from a community activist about a decade ago. He’s talking to Congress and he’s saying, you know, when GDP goes up in the halls of Congress, you all cheer, but we don’t know if it’s going up because of rate high rates of addiction, of credit card spending, maybe people are getting divorced at a really high rate and so they’re hiring divorce lawyers. Maybe we are farming our children out to commercial culture and they’re playing video games all day instead of hanging out with their parents or playing board games or going on walks. And so the sickest people in our society, the ones who are most ill are the most productive in some ways, because they run up really high medical bills. And so we expect to see the healthcare industry grow tremendously in the next 20 years or so, but that also may indicate that we’re getting sicker. And so GDP doesn’t say anything about that.
And there is an assumption of neoclassical economics that we can continue to grow forever, even though, you know, on the first page of the textbook, it always says that, you know, resources are finite and then the rest of the textbooks basically go on to ignore that. And so, yeah, we’re going to run out of stuff and we’re going to run out of stuff pretty soon. And there’s a wonderful, if you can, maybe I don’t even know if this is a picture that you can, an image you can use on the website, but there’s a wonderful picture by an economic historian named Clark, who wrote a book called “Farewell to Alms.” And the picture is a history of the world in one picture. And you can even look it up right now on Google while we’re talking, if you like, but it’s a pretty incredible picture because what it is is it shows income going back to the year, I believe, 1000. 1000 BCE, I believe, but I could be wrong. I don’t have it in front of me. And it shows income basically being stuck at about one and in the year, either 1750 or 1800, all of a sudden income shoots way, way up to 11 or 12 on the index. So we are, you know, we’re 11 or 12 times richer than people were in the year 1500. But what’s so interesting about that is that people more or less had had the same income and when we talk about income, we’re talking about access to food, heat, shelter, clothing. And when you look at that, people basically lived at the same income more or less until the industrial revolution and the industrial revolution comes. And all of a sudden we here in the rich world are collectively 12 times richer than any other humans who’ve ever lived. And then at the same time, there’s a divergence at the same moment. And you have people living in the global South who are poor, who are poorer than human beings have ever been. So at the same moment on earth, we have the richest human beings who’ve ever lived and the poorest human beings who’ve ever lived. And we have televisions and cell phones, which can, we can see each other on the planet. We’re living on the same planet. So that’s amazing.
But to go back to your question, what is responsible, was largely responsible for the spike in income in 1800 is coal and then other fossil fuels. And I think one of the things we’ve got to consider, more than consider, we’ve got to confront, is the fact that that’s not going to last forever. And so it may in fact be that we return to an income of about one, the way that people have mostly lived, or maybe less cause we’re going to destroy so many other things on this earth in the process of burning those fossil fuels. And then we’ll return to something like a Malthusian Trap; it’s very hard for population to grow because there’s just not enough food. And that’s going to happen in the next century or so. So that’s something that we give to the kids and maybe it’s a good way to start a course, and also, maybe it’s a good way to frame a whole course. Like this is the history of the world in one picture. What does this mean for us?
Jon M: [00:18:09] The standard textbooks often include material about “the free enterprise system.” It may not correspond to how things actually work in real life. Does this pose ethical questions for you as a teacher? And if so, how do you deal with them?
Lev M: [00:18:27] It does, I would say yes, I think it’s, it’s a really good question, Jon, uh, Dad.
Jon M: [00:18:32] I finally got you to start going with Jon.
Lev M: [00:18:38] When I was a kid and I was like 10 years old, I had my 10th birthday and he signed a birthday card, Love, Jon” and we were all a little shocked. So anyway,
That it does pose an ethical question. I mean, I think the question of whether or not to use the textbooks in the first place for econ in high school poses an ethical question, because it has very little to do with what’s going on in the real world. So I do think the obligation is to say, here is how markets work theoretically, and you can show them the models and teach them how to play around with the models. I then think a really good unit in any econ class, whether it’s high school or graduate school, is to talk about how markets fail.
And one of the ways is that markets are failing is that they’re not all that competitive anymore. And so in most sectors you’ve got two or three or four big firms, which dominate. Oligopolies. And there’s very little room for new trends, for new competitors. So that’s bad for consumers. You know, Smith talked about that. Everybody knows it. It’s bad for consumers because there’s poor quality and high prices. I think then what you do is you give lots of real world examples about all of the ways that these big firms are making life more difficult and more expensive. There are other ways that markets fail, right. And so markets don’t really take into account, many markets don’t take into account externalities. So you got a big factory and it’s polluting the river and everybody downstream is getting sick. Well, the price of the car out of that factory is way too low and we need to internalize those externalities. Well, markets don’t do that real well, and you could impose an effluent tax, um, but you know, governments don’t do that as much as they should because governments are captured by industry often.
And that brings up another problem. When we’re teaching government. All 12th grade teachers in New York State who teach history have to teach government. Well that model on the wall that we have of like how to pass a bill is basically irrelevant because it doesn’t deal with the fact that there’s lobbying and that industry has been captured and then after you’re in government, you go through the revolving door and you go work for the private sector and then you go back to government and become a regulator again. So yeah, I think you can use the textbooks. I think you then have a moral and ethical obligation to say yeah, but that’s actually, the world is much more complicated.
I don’t feel comfortable saying that’s not the way the world works. It’s the way some markets work, for sure. But I think many markets that are relevant for our lives and our, for our survival as a species, you know, those markets don’t do a very good job. They don’t work particularly well. Um, and so I would feel uncomfortable about using the free enterprise system, even to talk about free markets. You know, when Smith was writing about free markets, you got to imagine there’s a vast ocean with tiny islands. The firms are islands and they are maybe freely trading with each other. Although of course, that ignores totally the gunboats, right, and colonialism. There’s nothing free about coerced relationships that existed when Smith was writing, but, okay, let’s pretend that doesn’t exist. He’s talking about pretty small firms. He could not imagine the giant continent sized firms that we’re talking about, um, which are basically, you know, Soviet top down models of production. So, yeah, I think, no one’s real excited about the Soviet Union, but if you’re not excited about the Soviet Union, it’s kind of hard to get excited about our giant firms in America.
Amy H-L: [00:22:43] Right. And of course, many of these firms are multinationals. So yeah. Lev, John Dewey looked to education as preparing students to participate in democracy, but realistically, the main reason many students are in school is to get a job. Do you feel this tension when you’re teaching economics?
Lev M: [00:23:07] Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. Because my 12th grade class, the class that kids can sign up for, it’s an elective class. And so most of the time, it’s kids who are really excited about economics or politics. A lot of these kids who are interested in economics and want to go on to business school afterwards and they want to be able to use the content that I’m giving them. And I need to make sure that, you know, when they get to Econ 101 next year in college, that they know something. So I do feel that there’s that obligation. But I don’t primarily see myself as someone who is preparing kids for the workforce. I mean, I don’t go into the classroom thinking about how productive these kids are going to be someday, how much they’re going to add to GDP. It’s just not that interesting to me. And so, you know, you could make the argument that I’m not actually doing my job, but it’s never been articulated to me that that is my job. So I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing.
But I want to say something about the democracy, the democracy-building part of the job. I think that that’s really vital. So a big part of what we do in the class is the kids read the front page of the Times every day. There are frequent quizzes on the Times, but also on the course content, stuff we read the night before. Lots of quizzes, to keep them honest. I think it’s really important to know the content, so that’s partly, I think quizzes are really effective to do that. And I gave the quiz, the quizzes, I make the kids read the Times, because I read Dewey when I was an undergrad, before I thought about teaching, and he was one of the inspirations for me and why I wanted to become a teacher. And what he says about history, teachers is that history teachers have two goals, right. The first goal is to get young people interested in the world and to read the news.
And then the second goal is to go out and vote. And I think that that’s my job. It’s Io get them excited about the class, excited about the world around them, and then to go out and not just to vote. I think that’s just like the least you can do. It’s kind of like recycling, right. Like you’re supposed to recycle, right, but that’s not gonna, that’s not gonna save us all. So voting, voting is good. Yeah. It’s necessary. It’s important. And we know it’s important because there are lots of people out there trying to restrict the franchise. And so, you know, if it weren’t important, they wouldn’t be putting all these resources into, making it hard to vote. I think Dewey is onto something, but it’s more than that. It’s to really try to take back control of your life and the giant corporations that we were just talking about, with the help of the government, have really wrestled away a lot of control from us. And so I think that we, we need to have the tool, the analytical tools, you know, people like to talk about critical thinking. I think that’s important, right. I think we should, all try to articulate what we mean by critical thinking, but we need to be able to confront these powers if we’re going to survive, right. Because that’s what this is about.
Jon M: [00:26:20] There’s an organization and a website called 80,000 hours, based on the number of hours in a standard work life, that urges people to think about whether they’re maximizing the potential usefulness of their lives. When picking a career, is it part of a teacher’s or counselor’s responsibility to ask students to consider these questions?
Lev M: [00:26:44] Yeah, there’s a wonderful book by the anthropologist, he’s great and now he’s late, he passed away last month, David Graber, who’s also a real hero of mine. And he’s got a book called “Bullshit Jobs,” I hope I can curse on the, on the show, but it’s a book that everybody should read. He talks about, and it’s really relevant right now when we’re thinking about, we’re in the COVID crisis, and we’re thinking about essential workers. And it should be so obvious to us that the people who are most essential for our survival should be paid more, but of course, essential workers, for whatever reason, we’ve decided that they should be at the bottom of the pay scale and should have the least protections. And what he says is that there seems to be this strange kind of inverse relationship between the utility and usefulness of the jobs, the importance of the jobs and pay. So the more important the job, the less we pay people. So he says, you know, if you took all the firefighters and nurses and teachers one day and you made them disappear, society would collapse. If you took the, uh, the professional athletes, singers and hedge fund managers and made them disappear, it would be sad if the athletes and the singers disappeared, but if you made them disappear, nothing much would change. So most of the people in finance and he argues, in middle management, are not very useful. They’re doing bullshit work.
And this was, of course, to talk about how we determine who gets paid what, but I think, too, to answer your question, that I talked to the kids a lot about their work as students and what it means to do labor and what it means to be alienated from your labor. Most of the time, they don’t get to choose the kind of work that they do in school to produce stuff at an accelerating rate. So they were working harder than I certainly was working 25 years ago. And it’s worse than what happens to most of us because they produce this stuff and it goes nowhere. I guess it’s productive, but then it goes, the teacher reads it, grades it, and it goes into the real trash bin or the virtual trash bin.
So the kids are under the grind. They’re in the grinder there. Many of our kids are feeling stressed and depressed. They’re bored, and fundamentally, I don’t think that’s going to change when they get out of school. I think many people who are in the labor market are stressed or bored with their jobs or not being creative. They don’t get to play, which is one of the fundamental attributes of what it is to be a human being, that you want to play and be creative. And the only people who, you know, there are some people who will get to who get to do that stuff. But those are like, you know, the people who are well paid in our society. And so, yeah, I, we do talk about pay structures and we do talk about what their labor means and how they might, again, they might recapture the means of production. But they may recapture or capture for the first time the creative tools or tools that allow them to be creative and have a more meaningful life, a more, live a fuller life. And that doesn’t mean that they’re richer in terms of money, but that they get to do something they enjoy everyday. So we talk a lot about that. I’m not sure if that’s answering your question, Jon or Dad, but it is something we talk about a lot in class.
Jon M: [00:30:25] I think it does.
Amy H-L: [00:30:28] Lev, you’ve said that high school grades are actually part of the economic system. How so?
Lev M: [00:30:36] High school grades are part of the economic system in the sense that we are grading kids and sorting kids and then saying this kid is grade A and this kid is grade C, and the grade A kids get to go to elite colleges and then, you know, meet other elite friends, and then get good, well paying jobs. Yeah. That’s, that’s what we do. And I should be careful how I say this, but I think it’s pretty obvious to anybody who thinks about it at any length that, you know, grades are mostly meaningless, mostly nonsense. And what does it mean to be an 89.7 or when I grade homework, you know, I grade homework out of three, right. What does this mean? That it’s a three out of three. And even if I were to write notes next to it, right. This is excellent work. What does excellent work mean? So it’s very difficult to give grades that mean something. It’s very difficult to explain to kids what their grades mean when you have 34 kids in a class.
So one of the things that my dad and I were talking about before the show was, you know, is the whole system is it’s feels fundamentally unethical. Even grades feel unethical. Teaching 34 kids in a classroom feels unethical. It feels unethical to treat every kid as if they’re coming from exactly the same place. We’re in a moment where we’re teaching mostly virtually, and lots of kids don’t have access to the internet at home or a quiet home, or even a home at all. And we’re expecting them to do roughly similar work to kids who are living in, you know, fancy homes with high speed wifi. That seems unethical. And yet we do it every day. The City mandates that we give grades, we’ve got to figure out how to distribute those grades in an ethical manner. And I haven’t totally figured that out.
Jon M: [00:32:43] Lev, of course, one purpose of an economics course may be to interest students in becoming economists. Many more men go into economics as a field than women. And a number of women in the field have suggested that a lot of girls and young women get turned off before they’ve even started their college experiences. How can high school teachers try to change this?
Lev M: [00:33:07] I think it’s a good question. I certainly saw it in the early years when I was teaching this political economy class. It’s I see that less now. I see it. There’s many more young women in the class, and I think I take it as a sign that more young women are getting interested in economics. And I think it’s really positive. I think also the teacher has a responsibility to, you know. When I think about The Worldly Philosophers book, there’s not a single woman in the book. And so I think we have a responsibility to introduce our students to really exciting economists who are women. And there are a lot. So if you look at who’s winning the Nobel prizes, they’re women. So, I also think we need to talk about different topics. So one of the things I’m excited to talk about this year is the impact that COVID has had on women around the world. I think when we’re doing development economics, there’s a lot to say about that role, the role that women play in pulling communities up from poverty. And some evidence shows that they do a lot more than the men in their communities. And that’s true in both the so-called developed world and the developing world. So I think it’s the topics we choose to teach, it’s highlighting women, it’s making young women feel comfortable in the classes, not letting the boys speak over them, which happens a lot. Again, I should be careful not to overgeneralize, but many of the young boys in my class will not have done the homework the night before, but will very confidently raised their hand and say something that is, you know, pretty empty and expect a pat on the back or, at least, not to reprimand them for not having done the reading. And girls see this, and they don’t see their teachers confronting the boys on this overconfidence and lack of substance. And I think it’s actually really important for teachers to say, in a nice way, it seems clear you didn’t spend much time with work last night, and to reward people for doing the work and doing the hard work. And it is incredible how much, and it may just be the students that I’m teaching and it’s not all of them, but it’s incredible how much the boys get by on confidence. So I think it’s important for teachers to call it out and make girls feel more comfortable.
Amy H-L: [00:35:37] Thank you so much, Lev Moscow of The Beacon School and acorrection podcast.
Jon M: [00:35:48] And thank you listeners. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend or colleague. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps other people to find the show. Check out our website, ethicalschools.org, 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 and classes. We work with consultants to offer customized social emotional learning programs with a focus on ethics for schools and youth programs in the New York City area. You can contact us at hosts@tethicalschools.org. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @ethicalschools. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week.