Are Parent-Teacher Groups Leading? An Exploratory Study of Nonprofit-Government Interactions in the Public School Context

Abstract

Parent–teacher groups (PTGs) are nonprofits that play varying partnership roles with public schools with shared governance arrangements. However, these partnerships exhibit tensions between PTGs’ roles as engines of social participation and as financial resources. We explored factors that encourage or detract from PTGs’ leadership. We specifically explored PTGs’ autonomy around how they raise and allocate money with partnering schools and how funding partnerships vary across schools with different levels of affluence and racial composition. Our data came from an electronic survey of PTG presidents at public elementary schools in North Carolina. We found that school affluence matters in the leadership of these shared governance arrangements — with consequences not only for PTGs’ funding sources and activities, but also in the ways that PTGs financially partner with schools.

Keywords: nonprofit leadership; parent–teacher groups; partnership and collaboration; parent–teacher associations; governance