Camille is a School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII) Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her research focuses on the economics of education and labor economics. She is currently examining the spillover effect of charter expansion, the centralized assignment process used to assign teachers to schools, the role of principals in colleges, and the impact of teachers’ gender biases on student performance.
Camille attended the Paris School of Economics, where she received her B.A. in Economics in 2011 and her Ph.D. in Economics in 2016.
How did you first become interested in education equity?
I became interested in education equity when I worked as a research assistant for J-PAL at MIT a couple of years ago. I helped with the implementation of a Randomized Control Trial whose aim was to evaluate the impact of an after-class reading and writing program for 6 year-old students in France. Schools in a disadvantaged area north of Paris were asked if they wanted to participate in the evaluation; then some of them were randomly selected to benefit from the after-class support.
The evaluation ended with partial failure when we realized that the schools that had not been selected to benefit from the after-class program decided to compensate this by adopting alternative support programs. This taught me a lot about the hands-on implementation of RCTs and on its intricacies. I have continued studying education ever since.
How does teacher assignment affect education, and what can be done to change teacher assignment?
Most countries around the world face the same issue: inexperienced teachers are more likely to be assigned to high-minority and high-poverty schools. This is problematic for two reasons. First, because teachers’ performance (measured by how much they improve student achievement) improves over the first few years of experience. Second, because good
teachers have the potential to change more of the culture of a school and provide effective pedagogical tools and mentorship to struggling colleagues than to efficient colleagues. As a result, minority students often combine higher needs with lower access to quality teachers.
Diverse solutions have been tested to counteracting this mismatch. In the U.S several school districts provide effective teachers incentives to teach in the most disadvantaged schools. For instance, the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) is filling vacancies with high-achieving teachers who receive $20,000, paid over two years to teach at low-achieving schools. Teach For America is another example of a non-profit organization that recruits recent college graduates to teach for two years in hard-to-staff schools.
Other countries do not rely on financial incentives but on career perspectives to fill positions in disadvantaged schools. For instance, In France, teachers expect to start their career in disadvantaged schools because they have a higher priority to be assigned to better schools if they stay for at least five years in a disadvantaged school.
How might we mitigate the effect of gender bias in the classroom?
In many countries, boys are increasingly lagging behind girls at school. This disadvantage has important consequences: boys who fall behind are at risk of dropping out of school, not attending college or university, and/or being unemployed. On the other hand, girls are still significantly less likely to enroll in STEM courses in high school and in college. Some recent studies have highlighted the role of teachers’ gender biases on pupils’ progress and schooling decisions. Gender biases are most likely unconscious and they can take diverse forms: a bias in grades, but also a bias in the way teachers interact with boys and girls, or a bias in the kind of evaluation they use.
If the existence of gender biases is now well documented, how to mitigate theses biases is still an open question that should deserve much more attention. A simple solution could be to train teachers on the existence and effects of stereotypes. This could be an easy way to make teachers more aware of their potentially biased behavior. I also recently discovered an exciting tool designed by the MIT Teaching System Lab. They worked collaboratively with teachers and teacher educators to develop online interactive case studies where teachers can get a better understanding of how unconscious bias might impact their interactions with students.
How does the expansion of the charter school sector impact traditional public schools?
A couple of months after I started my Postdoc at MIT, the state of Massachusetts organized a ballot question on whether or not to expand the charter school sector. This drew national attention, and I started to get interested in the debate over charter schools. To give you an idea of the size of the sector, since its origins in the early 1990s, the charter school sector has grown to reach more than 6,900 schools serving roughly 3.1 million children. This rapid expansion gave rise to growing concerns about charter schools’ potential negative impact on non-charter students. One of the commonly shared concern is that the charter sector drains resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter schools.
I looked at that question using data on expenditures in non-charter schools and on students’ achievement. In 2011, Massachusetts lifted a cap on charter schools. As a result, several districts, including Boston, significantly increased their charter sector. What is less known is that non-charter schools who are losing students often receive compensatory revenues from the state to compensate for the lost students and revenue. In our study, we find that following the large post-2011 reform charter expansion, the districts where the charter sector expanded most did experience a small increase in their per-pupil expenditures. They also switched some of their expenditures from support services (such as administrative expenditures) to spending on instruction. Then we looked at the effect of the charter expansion on the achievement of students who stay in traditional public schools and found that their achievement improves, though only slightly.
What is your favorite thing about working at MIT?
I really enjoy how stimulating the research environment is, and the diverse opportunities I have had to interact with other labs on campus. I have met people from the Teaching System Lab, who talked about their interactive tools for teachers. They organize “dine and play” sessions to test their tools. I highly recommend them to anyone interested in education! I am also a big fan of the projects at the media lab!