Research

Work in Progress

School segregation: Is it all about residential sorting? Evidence from a nationwide school system 

Catchment areas are widely used in the school assignment process to define priorities. Usually drawn around schools, they are likely to reflect residential sorting. This paper focuses on the French context, where assignment to schools is residence-based but one third of students bypass the default assignment by resorting to opt-out options. Using novel geographic information data, I first show that the social composition of neighboring schools’ catchment areas sometimes dramatically differs. It suggests that, despite residential sorting and current school location, there is room for reducing social segregation across schools’ recruitment pools. In the second part of the paper, I evaluate the causal impact of a change in catchment areas’ boundaries on families’ behavioral reactions using a differencein-differences strategy. I show that families react both to assignment to a worse school and to a better school in terms of social composition. Reactions are stronger for families with a high socioeconomic status than for those with disadvantaged backgrounds. Given these behavioral reactions, only students with a low socioeconomic status experience a change in their exposure to students with a high socioeconomic status at the school level when assigned a different school in terms of social composition.

Link to the draft (February 2024)

Enrolling apart together : Optional courses as a mechanism for within-school segregation - Evidence from a French reform

The distribution of students’ characteristics at the class level is primarily determined by students’ characteristics at the school level. However, whether classmates look alike or differ from each other is ultimately defined by class assignment practices implemented by school administrators. Institutional features of school systems can affect these practices, and in turn foster segregation between classes of a same school. In this paper, I estimate the causal effect of offering extracurricular courses on within-school segregation, in a context where most of students’ school week consists of common compulsory courses. To that end, I examine the impact of a French reform which removed some extracurricular courses which were mostly taken by students with a high socioeconomic status. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I show that relative to a group of middle schools which have never offered these extracurricular courses, class assignment practices changed in middle schools which stopped offering them, translating into a 10 to 13 percent decline in within-school social segregation. I estimate that, compared to a situation where all students were randomly allocated to classes, these courses explain, depending on the grade level of interest, one third to half of the excess level of within-school segregation.

Link to the draft (February 2024)

Social diversity at schools, academic performance and social skills (join with Ghazala Azmat, Julien Grenet, Elise Huillery, and Yann Algan)

This paper examines whether desegregation at school may benefit all students and reduce social inequality in educational outcomes. We exploit a national initiative launched by the French Ministry of Education to desegregate voluntary middle schools, and matched these schools with similar schools, which have not engaged into desegregation. In the more segregated schools, the program was successful at increasing the exposure of low-SES to high-SES students, and conversely. Absolute academic performance of students from both background-types was not affected by the program, although the pre-existing gap in relative rank and academic self-esteem between both types of students widened. We also show that desegregation improved students’ social relationships: it induced more diverse friendship networks, and low-SES students report better school climate, higher quality of relationships with friends, and a greater feeling of safety at school, while leaving the one of high-SES students unchanged. Finally, we find some improvements in students’ values in favor of cooperation and solidarity. Overall, school desegregation brings social benefits, without negatively affecting the academic performance of any group.

Conferences and Seminars

2022

2021

2020

2018

Refereeing activity

2019 Education et Formations

Grants

2022 Research Grant, Education Policy and Social Mobility Chair 

2021 4th Year Doctoral Scholarship, Education Policy and Social Mobility Chair 

2018 Full Doctoral Scholarship, City of Paris