Meira Levinson

Assistant Professor of Education

Profile

Meira Levinson’s current work focuses on documenting and addressing the civic achievement gap: a gap in individuals’ civic and political knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that is starkly tied to race, ethnicity, immigration status, and especially class. Levinson argues that the U.S. civic achievement gap should be taken as seriously by educators and policymakers as the reading and math achievement gaps are, not least because it is unjust, undemocratic, and unnecessary. She is writing about these issues and others in a book on civic and multicultural education in de facto segregated urban schools and communities. Levinson has also written about liberal education and political theory, autonomy, parental versus children’s rights, school choice, and other topics in The Demands of Liberal Education and various articles and book chapters. A political theorist and philosopher of education by training, Levinson grounds her work in scholarship from a variety of disciplines as well as her eight years’ experience teaching middle school students in the Atlanta and Boston public schools. She believes strongly in the possibility of productive cross-fertilization (without loss of rigor) among scholarship, policy, and practice and attempts to realize this ideal in her work.

Levinson is co-convener of the Civic and Moral Education Initiative at HGSE.

Degrees

• Ph.D., University of Oxford