Two Michigan State University Spartans earned Dissertation Fellowships from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. The annual fellowships are bestowed to a selected group of doctoral students for furthering educational research through a rigorous process. Around 60 to 70 awardees are selected each year nationwide and are given a $27,500 stipend.

Patrick Massey (College of Social Science)

Patrick Massey is an applied microeconomist and Ph.D. candidate in economics at MSU. His research applies econometric and discrete choice methods to study teacher labor markets, education policy and the distribution of educational opportunity.

"Access to a high-quality education can be life-changing for students of all backgrounds, and unfortunately, students who attend rural schools or schools that primarily serve low-income populations typically have access to less effective teachers,” Massey said. “Most prior research on incentives asks whether we can pay teachers to raise their own effectiveness, and we've seen very little consistent evidence that those programs work. I ask a different question: can we use incentives to move highly effective teachers toward the low-income schools that need them most?”

Massey’s dissertation project examines “Incentives, Credentials and the Limits of Teacher Sorting: Evidence from Performance Pay in Texas.” He will study the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment, a statewide performance-based compensation program, launched in 2019 and designed to award effective teachers and incentivize them to work on high-need school campuses. Massey’s work was inspired by his family members who teach in Texas public schools and because Texas is his home state.

“Beyond the personal connection, what drew me in was that this policy created such an unusual set of incentives that I needed to understand how teachers were responding,” he said. “The more I learned about the design, the more I saw how it could reshape the Texas teacher labor market, and I wanted to know not just what was happening but why.”

Additionally, according to his research abstract, he will also recover teacher preferences about school working conditions and compensation to assess how much the program’s incentives would need to change to meaningfully alter their behavior. Altogether, his research aims to inform whether large-scale performance pay programs are effective at closing gaps in access to effective teachers.

“Receiving the NAEd Spencer Dissertation Fellowship is meaningful because I've believed in this work and its implications, and the fellowship tells me that scholars I deeply respect see the same value in it,” he said. “Getting that signal from this community, many of whom have shaped how I think about the questions in my dissertation, is genuinely rewarding.”

Massey’s research explores the economics of education, and he has served as a research assistant to Scott Imberman and participated in a three-year Michigan State Interdisciplinary Training in Education and Social Science (MITTENSS) fellowship. He received his master's in economics from the University of Texas at Austin and bachelor's in mathematics from Texas State University.

Christine Seon “Sol” Rheem (College of Education)

Rheem’s project examines “Migrants’ Moving Literacies in a Seasonal Harvest School.” She will focus on a school in Maine, which receives an influx of seasonal workers in August to help with the fruit harvest. The "Seasonal Harvest School educates rakers’ children, who come from Indigenous First Nations and Tribes, Mexico, Puerto Rico, southeastern U.S. states and from other towns in Maine,” Rheem’s research abstract explains. Rheem will analyze how these migrating youth “learn about language, literacy and identity as they move from place to place” and how “migrating youth’s literacy practices shape(and influence) how they are shaped by seasonal migration.”

“This is important because too often schools see migration as just something that happens before students arrive to learn, rather than a process that generates learning in and of itself,” said Rheem, a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education (CITE) program. "The dissertation centers migration and shares stories about movement, transition and change during a seasonal fruit harvest in rural Maine. So much consequential learning happens during this seasonal migration. Indigenous and Latine youth are using their language and literacy skills to tell their own stories, learn from others and understand who they want to be in the world."

Rheem has been returning seasonally to this school in Maine for over 10 years to work as an educator during the fruit harvest. Born in Seoul, Korea, Rheem’s history and experience has been impacted by immigration experiences, including a name changes both formal (born 선, or Seon, and changed to “Christine” in English-language documents upon immigrating to the U.S.) and chosen (“Sol” is an adopted nickname bestowed by friends in Guatemala). Her experiences as an immigrant student and an immigrant teacher of immigrant students taught her to pay attention to what multilingual, multicultural and migratory people learn as they navigate across different worlds.

The research work has already begun and is expected to conclude in 2027.

“I am so happy to celebrate the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship with everyone who has supported me to become the thinker, researcher and writer who earned this honor,” Rheem said.

Rheem is a University Distinguished Fellow (MSU Graduate School) and previously earned the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (MSU Asian Studies Center). She is a proud Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers alum.

Before joining MSU, Rheem earned a bachelor's in Spanish and Latin American Studies with a teaching minor from Bowdoin College.

This story was originally featured on the College of Education website.