Profile: Clarisse Haxton
"It just started snowballing," explains Clarisse Haxton. "Ever since I came, I have taken electives in the Sociology Department, and as I spent more time in sociology, people started asking me, 'Why don't you do the joint degree?'"
A Ph.D. student who came to Penn GSE after a stint as a Teach For America corps member, Clarisse has always been interested in the sociological issues of education — issues like school climate and safety and students' experiences in school. So it was no surprise when she found herself taking most of her electives in Penn's sociology department.
Her interest in education started in college: A political science and public policy major, she did a case study on No Child Left Behind and teacher certification as it played out in three public high schools in Chicago. As a TFA teacher, she taught middle school in Philadelphia — and loved it.
"I love teaching and I loved middle school students, but part of my frustration with teaching is that it seems so small. The problems in urban schools are so much bigger than one teacher in one classroom — and that got me interested in policy."
Penn GSE's involvement with the Philadelphia schools was a big draw for Clarisse: "It's awesome to be at a university that is right in an urban school district. Being here has meant I had the opportunity to do my research in the schools and in Philadelphia."
Her research path has come as something of a surprise to Clarisse. "I didn't think of myself as a math person before I came to GSE. I really didn't have a strong statistical background," Clarisse explains.
But she was interested in learning about quantitative research methods so, in her first year, she began attending IES seminars. IES is short for the Institute of Education Sciences, and Penn GSE's IES program provides training in interdisciplinary methods to pre-doctoral students interested in education research. Encouraged by Rebecca Maynard — the director of the IES program and her advisor, Clarisse applied to the program and was named an IES Fellow her second year.
Clarisse also credits Maynard with helping her get ahead of the curve on her dissertation, which focuses on the high school selection process in Philadelphia. "I was working on a project with Becca," she explains, "a larger project from which I could take a piece for my dissertation. I was involved in designing the evaluation and involved with meeting with the principals and getting their buy-in for the study and spending time in the schools just to observe what was going on there."
Like so much of the research she's done at Penn, Clarisse's thesis draws on qualitative and quantitative methods: "As a part of the graduate experience, you come to know yourself as a researcher," she says. "I am definitely a mixed methods researcher, but more quantitatively weighted. What I mean by that is that it's very important to know as many methods as you can because different questions need to be answered using different methods. So you can design an experiment and look at the impacts of the students' outcomes — and that is a quantitative question. But then once you have that, it's important to know why. What was going on in the school to make some kids' outcomes better than others?
Looking ahead, Clarisse says, "I definitely want to continue a career in research. I'm considering becoming a professor, both because I love the research and the teaching. As far as teaching is concerned, I've had the opportunity to TA for two classes at GSE, and last fall I taught my first class on my own — Sociology of Education. But I'm also open to the idea of working for a research firm — because working on a research team could be really valuable at the beginning of my career."