Professor Etai Mizrav Uses His Research into Educational Inequality to Enliven Public Policy Classes
By: Daniel Cohen
Dr. Etai Mizrav, an assistant teaching professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern’s Arlington campus, whose research focuses on the 21st-century drivers of educational inequality, considers his time spent in the classroom the best part of his week.
“I’ve taught many students over the past two years. … They’re young, brilliant, and full of fantastic ideas,” he said. Mizrav is impressed with his students’ enthusiasm to take on the planet’s most daunting challenges, such as climate change and an array of global health issues. “It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to share the classroom with them.”
Before coming to Northeastern last year, he was a consultant for school systems nationwide, and served as a policymaker for Washington, D.C.’s school system, working on projects aimed at identifying achievement gaps, assessing the role played by discriminatory policies and improving access to quality teachers. Mizrav’s work also scrutinizes the underlying factors determining whether education policies at the state and local level achieve their desired results.
He draws on that experience to illustrate the subjects he covers in the classroom — principles of statistical and economic policy analysis, research methods and public administration. “For example, I teach statistical analysis, a general class,” Mizrav said. “But you’ll learn a lot about education policy by the time you are done with it.” He uses case studies from his research to illuminate the course material.
Northeastern’s emphasis on experiential learning — and the opportunity for policy students to apply classroom lessons during an internship with a nonprofit, a local, federal or international agency, or other relevant employer — is one of the features that attracted Mizrav to the school. But he attributes his success as a consultant and working for local government to what he learned from professors and his studies while pursuing his public policy and education degrees.
“It’s what you learned in the classroom — how to work with data [and] produce data-driven recommendations for your boss that are compelling and based on sound analysis. That is what will help,” he said. “That’s why I try to keep my classes both academically rigorous, and very applicable.”
Acquiring the Tools to Explore Inequality
Early in his career, Mizrav never intended to become a researcher or professor. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Mizrav moved to Washington, D.C., to pursue a master’s in public policy at Georgetown University, furthering his interest in public education and social policy.
His next post, manager of education policy and equity at D.C.’s state education agency, allowed him to apply his academic training in policy and analysis to help reduce achievement gaps and ensure equitable access to excellent teachers across the city’s schools. After four years, though, Mizrav felt “stuck” in his efforts to mitigate educational disparities throughout the district.
He identified the effects of school segregation that persist many decades after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed state-sanctioned separation of schools by race as a primary hurdle for success. Mizrav examined multiple policies that drive de facto segregation even in the absence of explicit formal segregation, including school choice, attendance boundaries and the reliance on property taxes to fund education.
“Every policy is perfectly tailored to get the results it gets, so if schools are segregated, it means we have policies that segregate them. But since we don’t acknowledge it, and think of segregation as a historical fact and not as a 21st century policy outcome, desegregation efforts are insufficient,” he said.
Mizrav’s frustration led him to leave his position with the city and pursue a PhD in education at George Washington University. “I wanted to invest more in understanding that problem,” he said.
Joining a Campus with an Entrepreneurial Orientation
Before finishing his doctorate, Mizrav began teaching a class on educational inequality at Georgetown University and leading policy research and implementation projects on educational inequality and the teacher workforce for the American Institutes for Research. But after earning his PhD, he realized he wanted to move away from consulting and focus more on teaching and academic work. “I was looking for a way to share my interests with students,” he said.
Mizrav quickly discovered that Northeastern’s Arlington campus offered a host of advantages, including its location minutes from D.C. where federal policy is made and hundreds of international development organizations, nonprofits and think tanks are based. That proximity could provide a multitude of internship opportunities and help attract students from around the globe.
He also admired the school’s entrepreneurial nature and saw a chance to help build the Master of Public Policy (MPP) and Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs at the Northeastern campus. “There is an opportunity here for me to help create a program that is part of the D.C. ecosystem and is unique from the mothership in Boston,” Mizrav said. “I was very drawn to it, and am very happy to be here.”
He encourages recent graduates and professionals considering a career in public affairs — and the prospect of improving well-being for society — not to be dissuaded by the current U.S. administration’s effort to shrink the federal workforce. “Now is a time that the federal government needs great people, more than ever. We’re teaching how students can become effective public servants regardless of who is in the administration,” Mizrav said.
“Don’t be afraid to get your MPP or MPA degree and enter the policy world. It’s as important as it ever was; probably more so,” he added.
