Grading and Grade Inflation: Instructional Faculty Experiences

Mira Debs

Lecturer in Sociology and Education Studies

Mira Debs is a lecturer in Sociology and Education Studies.

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, comparative international education, parent involvement, school choice, and school integration in research locations including Copenhagen, New York City and Hartford, CT.

Research from her first book, Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in an Era of School Choice (Link is external) (Link opens in new window)(Harvard Education Press, 2019) has been featured in the New York Times(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), the Washington Post(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), and the Christian Science Monitor(Link is external) (Link opens in new window). She is the co-editor of the Handbook on Montessori Education(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) (Bloomsbury 2023).

Other research examines how groups form collective identity through objects, history and their children’s schooling including studies on school integration activism in New York City, Italian art and India’s independence struggle. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record, the American Education Research Journal, Comparative Education, Research in Comparative and International Education, Cultural Sociology, Nations and Nationalism and the Journal of Montessori Research as well as in the New York Times(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), Ed Week(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), Washington Post(Link is external) (Link opens in new window),. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Brady Foundation and WEND Ventures.

Dr. Debs has taught in varied environments including high school, Wesleyan University, Yale NUS, and a maximum security prison as part of the Yale Prison Education Initiative. She previously served as the director of the Education Studies program from 2017 to 2025.

Megann Licskai

Lecturer in History and HSHM and Senior Project Director in HSHM

Fields of interest: 

US & Canadian medical history; reproductive medicine & justice; gender, science, & medicine; feminist STS; emotions, science, & medicine; biopolitics; life, death & personhood; bodies & medicine in the media; health politics, activism, conservatism

Bio: 

Megann Licskai is a historian of medicine who focuses on 20th- and 21st-century reproductive politics and health activism. She received her B.A. in Contemporary Studies and History of Science from the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and her PhD from HSHM at Yale. Before returning to Yale to teach, she spent a year as a Faculty Fellow in the Foundation Year Program, a writing-intensive great books program at her alma mater where she taught everything from Gilgamesh to Audre Lorde.

 

Megann’s current book project is tentatively titled “Pro-Life Science: the Production and Circulation of Reproductive Knowledge in North American Anti-Abortion Movements, 1968-2003,” and historically examines the ways in which anti-abortion movements have used scientific and medical spaces, language, and technologies to make authority claims and to effect political change. More broadly, Megann is interested in histories of reproductive health; the ethics of doing history (medical and otherwise); changing forms of American conservatism; feminist science studies; and questions of life, death and personhood. As a teacher, she aims to offer courses that help students to develop research and argumentative skills to deeply consider and articulate the historical and contemporary import of such questions.

 

In addition to her research and teaching, Megann has spent time working for Yale’s Medical Historical Library, where she co-curated and co-coordinated a number of exhibits focusing on health justice and the history of medicine. Megann also spent time working for a small health non-profit in her hometown of London, Ontario. Both roles reshaped her thinking about medical practices and ethics. When not working, Megann loves playing her autoharp and cooking fun things. She suspects that she is the foremost Pokémon expert among the HSHM faculty.