RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Civil Society Goes to School: Parent-Teacher Associations and the Equality of Educational Opportunity
JF RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
FD Russell Sage Foundation
SP 41
OP 63
DO 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.3.03
VO 5
IS 3
A1 Brittany Murray
A1 Thurston Domina
A1 Linda Renzulli
A1 Rebecca Boylan
YR 2019
UL http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/3/41.abstract
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.