PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Brittany Murray
AU  - Thurston Domina
AU  - Linda Renzulli
AU  - Rebecca Boylan
TI  - Civil Society Goes to School: Parent-Teacher Associations and the Equality of Educational Opportunity
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.3.03
DP  - 2019 Mar 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 41--63
VI  - 5
IP  - 3
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/3/41.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/3/41.full
AB  - Where do parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and other similar school-linked nonprofits form? What role do PTAs play in distributing educational opportunities between and within public schools? In this paper, we link IRS data describing nonprofit organizations associated with North Carolina public schools to school- and student-level administrative data in order to answer these questions. Our analyses suggest PTAs form in a wide variety of school contexts, but high-revenue PTAs form primarily in affluent, predominantly white schools. Students in schools with active PTAs enjoy relatively strong achievement growth compared to their peers in schools without active PTAs. However, our analyses suggest that in reading, the benefits associated with PTAs flow disproportionately to nonpoor students.