In the past, society championed public schools for their ability to bring together students of different socio-economic backgrounds. Do specialty programs like French Immersion threaten the social cohesion that resulted from this mixing?
In his job market paper, The Provision of Public Choice Options in Mixed Public-Private Education Systems: Evidence from British Columbia, Marc-Antoine Châtelain, a PhD candidate with the Department of Economics explored these questions while investigating the impact of French Immersion programs on both students who opted into the programs, and those who didn’t.
“In North America, there’s been an increase in choice alternatives to traditional public schools,” he explained. “For example, in Canada, French Immersion programs have become increasingly popular, and in the United States, charter schools and magnet schools have seen similar growth. This increase in school choice within the public sector comes with some positive aspects, such as improved school quality and tailored programs that help students learn new skills, but inequality is a great concern in our societies today, and education systems have a role in addressing it and in trying to foster a more equitable society.”
The data Châtelain accessed concerned all students in the province, as well as their parents’ tax records.
“I got lucky with a great dataset available at the Statistics Canada Research Data Centers,” Châtelain said. “I studied the expansion of French Immersion programs in British Columbia. Between 1998 and 2015, there was an 80% increase in the total number of students in grade one attending French Immersion. There were introductions of new Early French Immersion programs, and I use this source of variation to estimate the effects of increasing school choice.”
Whether students opt-in to French immersion, he found, has much to do with the income levels of their parents.
“I find that students from higher-income families are more likely to select French Immersion when it is introduced. This increase is mostly driven by students leaving regular public schools to join French Immersion programs. I do find some positive effects on both low-income and higher-income students, but it also comes with an increase in inequality. Higher-income students tend to benefit more from the expansion of school choice, partly because low-income students are less likely to opt for these programs.”
The findings suggest that school boards and ministries of education can implement outreach policies and more targeted support for disadvantaged students to incentivize them to join school choice programs.
“I don’t think school choice programs like this are going away, so there are ways we can make them more accessible,” Châtelain explained. “School principals and school boards can engage families that are less likely to consider these options. Providing additional support to these families when they join these programs could be beneficial.”
School choice has become a popular area of study in the economics of education.
“Marc-Antoine is a remarkably innovative and technically skilled economist whose research has consistently impressed me,” said Philip Oreopoulos, a Distinguished Professor of Economics of Education. “His ability to leverage administrative data with cutting-edge quasi-experimental techniques to address important policy questions, particularly in the Economics of Education, is exceptional. Marc’s work not only advances academic understanding but also provides actionable insights for policymakers, making him a rising star in applied microeconomics.”
Châtelain’s research interests have impacted his scholarly values and how he communicates those values in the tutorials he leads as a teaching assistant.
“When leading a tutorial, I really want everyone to be comfortable asking questions,” he said. “Having an interactive tutorial is important. If you’re just in front of the classroom telling them how it’s done, we lose the value of the experience. I want students to gain skills that will help them form intellectually stimulating careers and succeed in their professional aspirations. I want them to become self-confident in using those skills. If they get a job that leverages those skills, I want them to feel like, ‘Yes, I know how to use these skills. It’s not just a course I took; I’m able to do it.'”
In seminars with his colleagues, Châtelain has focused on the same spirit of mutual success through improving skills and collaboration.
“With colleagues, you want to give them constructive feedback, not just critical thoughts” he said. “There’s a balance. It’s useful to receive criticism if you’re doing something wrong, but it’s even more useful if you can propose a way to fix what you see as a flaw in the research.”
That spirit of collaboration among colleagues has resulted in an interdisciplinary collaborative paper. Châtelain, along with En Hua Hu, Paul Han, and Xiner Xu worked with mathematics instructors at the University of Toronto to implement an experiment examining how model misspecification affects belief updating.
“It’s about how students’ beliefs in the noisiness of the grades they receive affect how they revise their beliefs about how they will perform in the course,” Châtelain explained. “For example, a student may start a course overconfident, thinking it will be easy. Then they receive a bad grade and modify their belief about their performance. If they update this belief accurately, they might take steps to mitigate potential challenges, but if they don’t update their belief correctly and think the grade isn’t representative, they might not change their behavior and could potentially fail the course. We randomly assigned students to receive information on the informativeness of their test scores. We told some students, based on previous iterations of the courses, that these test scores are highly correlated. Performing well on one test is a good signal that they’ll perform well later, so they should take this information seriously. Providing them with this information improved their predictions. Specifically, before each test, we asked students to predict how they would perform. This intervention significantly reduced their prediction errors.”
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