Mira Debs

Mira Debs
Executive Director, Education Studies, C-45 Humanities Quadrangle
(203) 432-4631
 

Mira Debs is the Executive Director of the Education Studies Program and a lecturer in Sociology. She teaches EDST 110 Foundations in Education Studies, EDST 282/PSLC 417 Comparative International Education, and advises senior capstones.  

Dr. Debs graduated from the University of Chicago, received a Rhodes Scholarship to complete an MPhil in European Politics and teacher training from Oxford University and a PhD in Sociology from Yale.  Dr. Debs conducts research on urban education, parent involvement, school choice, school integration, and progressive public schools in locations including New York City, Hartford, Germany, India, Denmark and Singapore .

Research from her book, Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in an Era of School Choice (Harvard Education Press, 2019) has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Ed Weekand the Christian Science Monitor. She is the co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Montessori Education (2023). Her work has been published in the American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record, the American Education Research Journal, History of Education Quarterly, Comparative Education, Research in Comparative and International Education,  and the Journal of Montessori Research. Dr. Debs’ other studies have examined how groups form collective identity with case studies on Italian art and India’s independence struggle published in Cultural Sociology, Nations and Nationalism. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Brady Foundation and WEND Ventures.

Prior to graduate school, Dr. Debs taught high school in Boston area public schools. She serves on the Yale Prison Education Advisory Committee, she helped to create Elm City Montessori School in New Haven in 2014 and served as a board member for 10 years, and she also co-founded Montessori for Social Justice, a grassroots organization of public Montessori educators. She plays viola in the New Haven Civic Orchestra.