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

家长-教师组织和学习机会的分配这个项目以家长-教师组织(PTO)为视角，观察家长和社区如何共同努力，为孩子的教育做出贡献。作者还考虑了这些集体努力造成的教育不平等的后果。虽然之前的研究大多认为PTO对学校财务的贡献很小，但超过90%的小学生家长报告说，他们参加了PTO会议。家长通过PTO采取的集体行动往往有助于定义学校文化，并影响学校内学习机会的分配。由于临时技术援助的参与率以及获得临时技术援助所产生的财政、组织和社会资本资源的机会因种族/族裔和社会经济群体的不同而有很大差异；临时技术援助可能同时使一些学生受益，并在学校之间和学校内部再现不平等方面发挥重要作用。为了理解家长的集体行为及其后果，作者提出了三个关于PTO在学校中如何运作的理论假设：PTO作为资源的生成者，PTO作为社会资本，PTO作为机会囤积的机制。分析通过以下研究问题来验证这些假设：家长-教师组织如何影响小学实践以及学生的行为和学业结果？家长教师组织在多大程度上促进了学校之间和学校内部的教育不平等？为此，作者构建了一个史无前例的描述小学家长-教师组织的数据档案。与城市研究所国家慈善统计中心的美国非营利组织美国国税局(IRS)文件数据库合作，作者提取了2005至2012年间附属于美国公立学校的家长教师组织的数据，并将这些记录与(1)国家教育统计中心的学校级别数据联系起来。全国代表性学校和工作人员调查(SASS)和(2)来自北卡罗来纳州所有公立小学的学生水平数据。这项工作，再加上旨在验证父母国税局措施的定性研究？通过揭示这些组织是如何形成和运作的，集体行动将对社会学领域以及教育实践作出重大贡献。

Parent-Teacher Organizations and the Distribution of Learning OpportunitiesThis 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.