Professionalizing the PTO: Race, Class, and Shifting Norms of Parental Engagement in a City Public School

Middle‐Class Parents and Urban Public Schools: Current Research and Future Directions

“…Sociological scholarship on urban education frequently focuses on the inequities experienced by low‐income students in large city school districts. Recently, however, a growing body of American and European literature has called attention to the decisions of middle‐class and upper‐middle‐class parents, particularly Whites, to consider and/or enroll their children in socioeconomically mixed or predominantly low‐income urban public schools (Billingham and Kimelberg ; Butler and Robson ; Cucchiara , ,; Cucchiara and Horvat ; Kimelberg forthcoming a,b; Kimelberg and Billingham ; Petrilli ; Posey ; Posey‐Maddox , ; Reay, Crozier, and James ; Reay et al , ; Stillman ). While it is still the case that most urban low‐income students in the United States attend high‐poverty, racially isolated schools, the movement of middle‐class families into some urban public schools raises important questions about the extent to which such changes disrupt existing patterns of segregation and inequality or contribute to new forms of marginalization and exclusion.…”

“…However, they are also based on the belief that the individual schools these families select will receive a direct infusion of financial, human, and cultural capital as a result. As numerous studies demonstrate, this assumption is not unwarranted; middle‐class parents devote enormous amounts of time, money, and skilled labor to their children's schools and classrooms, advocating for and securing improvements in facilities, academics, and extracurricular opportunities (Billingham and Kimelberg ; Brantlinger ; Cucchiara ; Cucchiara and Horvat ; Lareau and Muñoz ; Posey‐Maddox ). Coupled with the academic and social advantages students derive from learning in socioeconomically and racially integrated settings (Coleman et al ; Kahlenberg ), it is easy to understand how an increase in middle‐class families in urban public schools might be seen as an unqualified good.…”

Policy advocacy, inequity, and school fees and fundraising in Ontario, Canada

“…Many critics argue fundraising reproduces class inequalities. Posey-Maddox's (2013 research in Chicago public schools, for example, demonstrated that fundraising not only exacerbates disparities in resources and educational opportunities within and across schools and districts but it can also result in marginalization of low-income parents within schools. Similarly, Sattem (2007) demonstrated that parents in wealthier neighbourhoods possess social and cultural competencies that enable them to bring funds into schools whereas families in low income neighbourhoods face barriers to fundraising including lack of time and social and cultural resources.…”

The ethics of pandering in Boston Public Schools’ school assignment plan

“…This can result in the marginalization of committed low-income parents and destruction of nascent or established initiatives designed to serve low-income students-in turn setting up the mechanisms that unduly privilege middleclass families' participation and interests in the future. See Cucchiara, 2008;Cucchiara and Horvat, 2009;Posey-Maddox, 2013;DeSena, 2006. 5 For the first year, each school's MCAS average was calculated as a combination of absolute performance (counting for 2/3) and growth scores (counting for 1/3).…”