Two new fourth-year thesis grants by the Education Policy and Social Mobility Chair in 2024-2025

Desislava Tartova is a PhD student at PSE and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is writing a thesis entitled “Socio-economic disparities in education and policies to tackle them”, under the supervision of Luc Behaghel.

Her thesis aims to contribute to the large literature on teacher quality by aiding to understand what is the best way to train future teachers and what remuneration policies can be designed to increase the retention of good teachers, especially in regions where teachers’ outside options are vast and much better paid. Her first project develops a method for measuring teacher quality in settings without annual standardized testing, such as secondary education in France. Her second project uses extensive novel survey data of teacher practices to explain what pedagogical practices high-quality teachers adopt. Finally, her third project studies to what extent the decreasing retention of teachers can be explained by improvements in local labor market private sector wages, and what the consequences are for the quality of the remaining teaching force.

Vivien Liu is a PhD student at PSE and ENS-PSL. She is writing a thesis entitled “Inequalities in Guidance”, under the supervision of Marc Gurgand.

Vivien studies educational track choices, focusing on the determinants of these decisions and the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving the match between students and tracks. Her first two projects address the choice between academic and vocational tracks in secondary education. In one project, she studies how comprehensive schools affect this choice by shaping both student performance and aspirations, and by formally granting access to selective tracks. Her second project aims at documenting and explaining the social gap in track choice, linking it to disparities throughout the different stages of the decision-making process. It shows how aspirations and teacher validation, as well as teacher grading contribute to inequality. Her two other projects consist in evaluating interventions aimed at improving students’ educational choices using randomized field experiments: a teacher training program and an online tool providing personalized information on post-secondary programs.

The Education Policy and Social Mobility Chair aims to highlight the mechanisms of unequal access to education, and to identify the policies and actions likely to correct them. This is a key issue for all citizens, which concerns not only public decision makers but also civil society and philanthropic groups that devote much“ effort to supporting young people and their families.