Collaborative Research: Parent-Teacher Organizations and the Distribution of Learning Opportunities

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

Parent-Teacher Organizations and the Distribution of Learning Opportunities This project uses parent-teacher organizations (PTOs) as a lens to view the ways in which parents and communities work together to contribute to children's education. The authors also consider the consequences for those collective efforts for educational inequality. While prior research largely views PTOs as inconsequential based on their small contributions to school finances, more than 90 percent of parents of elementary school children report attending a PTO meeting. The collective action that parents undertake via PTOs often contributes to the definition of school cultures and shapes the distribution of learning opportunities within schools. Since PTO participation rates, as well as access to the financial, organizational, and social capital resources that PTOs generate, vary substantially across racial/ethnic and socio-economic groups; PTOs may simultaneously benefit some students and play a significant role in the reproduction of inequality across and within schools. To make sense of parental collective actions and their consequences, the authors develop three theoretically-informed hypotheses about how PTOs operated in schools: PTOs as generators of resources, PTOs as social capital, and PTOs as mechanisms for opportunity hoarding. The analyses test these hypotheses by addressing the following research questions: How do parent-teacher organizations affect elementary school practices as well as student behavioral and academic outcomes? To what extent do parent-teacher organizations contribute to educational inequality both between and within schools? To do so, the authors construct an unprecedented data archive describing elementary school parent-teacher organizations. Working with the Urban Institute's National Center for Charitable Statistics' database of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings for U.S. non-profit organizations, the authors have extract data describing parent-teacher organizations affiliated with U.S. public schools between 2005 and 2012 and link these records with (1) school-level data from the National Center of Education Statistics? nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and (2) student-level data from all North Carolina public elementary schools. This work, coupled with qualitative research designed to validate IRS measures of parents? collective action, will significantly contribute to the field of Sociology as well as educational practice by shedding light on how these organizations form and operate.