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本项目以家长-教师组织为视角，观察家长和社区如何共同为儿童教育做出贡献。作者还考虑了这些集体努力对教育不平等的影响。虽然之前的研究很大程度上认为PTO对学校财政的贡献很小，但超过90%的小学生家长报告参加了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，并塑造学校内学习机会的分配。由于专利商标局的参与率，以及获得专利商标局产生的财政、组织和社会资本资源的机会，在种族/民族和社会经济群体之间存在很大差异；pto可能同时使一些学生受益，并在学校之间和学校内部的不平等再现中发挥重要作用。为了理解家长的集体行为及其后果，作者提出了三个理论上有根据的假设，关于家长的集体行为是如何在学校运作的：家长的集体行为是资源的创造者，家长的集体行为是社会资本，家长的集体行为是机会囤积的机制。分析通过解决以下研究问题来检验这些假设：家长-教师组织如何影响小学实践以及学生的行为和学业成绩？家长-教师组织在多大程度上助长了学校之间和学校内部的教育不平等？为此，作者构建了一个前所未有的描述小学家长教师组织的数据档案。利用城市研究所的国家慈善统计中心的美国非营利组织的美国国税局（IRS）备案数据库，作者提取了2005年至2012年间与美国公立学校相关的家长教师组织的数据，并将这些记录与国家教育统计中心的校级数据联系起来。全国代表性的学校和人员配备调查（SASS）和(2)来自北卡罗莱纳州所有公立小学的学生水平数据。这项工作与定性研究相结合，旨在验证美国国税局对父母的衡量标准。集体行动，将通过揭示这些组织的形成和运作方式，对社会学领域和教育实践做出重大贡献。

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.