Thisie Pinhatti Schisler-Do

Primary Interest Area: Educational Equity, Accountability, Financial Equity, Improving Low-Performing Schools, and the Economics of Education

1. What is your background?
I am originally from Brazil. I moved to America when I was nine years old and have lived here and abroad since then. I attended Rochester Institute of Technology, where I obtained my bachelor’s in international studies with minors in economics and Arabic. Before coming to the University of Rochester, I had no prior experience in the field of Education.

2.Why did you decide to pursue a master’s in educational policy?           
I had always been interested in education and education issues. When I first started school, I wanted to become a biology teacher. However, I veered away from biology into international relations. When I was at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I did a research capstone paper focused on education issues of developing countries. I knew then that I had always been passionate about educational issues. I wanted to pursue a master’s in educational policy to gain knowledge and insight into educational issues and help to rectify them in the future.

3. What most attracted you to the UR/Warner School?
There are three main reasons why I chose the Warner School for my master’s in educational policy. First, the School’s prestige drew me to explore the education programs offered at the University of Rochester. I immediately fell in love with the fact that the School is close to home and that it has an accelerated master’s program, but most importantly, because the program strongly emphasizes and encourages research in the field of education, shown by the field project aspect of the master’s program. I highly agree with this opinion and the structure of the program, so I chose the Warner School largely due to this reason.

4. What are some of your favorite class(es) that you’ve taken at Warner?  Why?
I am in love with statistics and economics. I’m crazy; I know. However, this had led me to love the classes with data analysis involved, including: School Finance in K-12 School Systems, Basics in Applied Quantitative Data Analysis, Master’s Research Methods, and Sociology of Education.

5. What are you doing for your field project and how do you think it will benefit you?            
I am currently working with Drs. Brian Brent and Karen DeAngelis. We have worked on a couple of different projects, all relating to financial equity in schools. The first project that we began working on involves assessing the equity of the distribution of local sales taxes to schools in New York State, and the other research project investigates the spending on security of charter schools. Throughout this research project, I have been able to contribute to the formulation of research proposals, literature reviews, survey design, data collection, data analysis, the formation of results and conclusions, research write-ups, and presentation of data and results. I feel that this field project has highly prepared me for my future career in education research and analysis by providing me with the tools and knowledge that I need to perform research and by giving me the experience of how the research process works. I am very happy with the field aspect of the master’s program.

6. What are you interested in doing after graduation?
I would like to work in Washington, D.C. in the field of education research and educational policy analysis. I firmly believe that research and policy in the field of Education can help to rectify the structural inequalities that we see in our present-day education systems, if done correctly and if inclusive. I hope to find a job related to my topics of interest, which largely involve studying why inequities occur between and within schools.