Practicing Parental Involvement: Heterogeneity in Parent Involvement Structures in Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Abstract

Purpose: This study examines differences in the mechanisms that charter schools and traditional public schools use to facilitate parental school involvement and the degree to which these differences account for the high levels of involvement among charter school parents. Data and Research Methods: We merge data from principals and teachers from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and National Teacher and Principal Survey with nonprofit tax data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics. We use ordinary least squares regression to explain how charter and traditional public schools involve parents in communal, public-good activities, and individualistic, private-good activities within schools. Findings: Charters are less likely than traditional public schools to use bureaucratic structures, like parent–teacher organizations, and more likely to use nontraditional and less bureaucratic structures, like parent workshops and compacts. The use of such structures mediates a portion of the charter advantage; however, they only partially explain the association between being a charter and parent involvement. Additionally, we find some of the outreach structures that are most common in charter schools, including compacts, are also more strongly associated with parent involvement in charter schools than in traditional public schools. Implications: While charters have more public-good and private-good parent involvement than traditional public schools, our results suggest that the uncritical adoption of outreach strategies from one sector to another is unlikely to result in equal gains in parental involvement.

Keywords

charter schools parent involvement bureaucracy work contexts quantitative analysis

The charter school movement emerged over the past three decades as part of a broad wave of neoliberal policies that sought to privatize public services (Levin, 1987, 2003; Renzulli, 2014). The movement has been remarkably successful in this regard. Although publicly financed, charter schools expand the role of the market in K-12 education; forcing traditional public schools to compete for enrollments among families who have multiple school choices. Today, approximately 7,000 charter schools enroll 2.8 million students across 44 states (Center for Education Reform, 2018; McFarland et al., 2018).

Charter advocates argue that charters, freed from many bureaucratic regulations and conventions that lead to inefficiency and unresponsiveness in traditional public schools, would respond to market forces, innovate, and nimbly meet the needs of parents and society at large. Forging powerful educational partnerships with students’ families is one area in which charters demonstrate this comparative advantage (Smith et al., 2011). Since enrolling in a charter school requires an active choice by students and their parents, charter schools typically enroll students whose parents are inclined to be highly involved in their children’s schooling (Curry et al., 2016). Indeed, participating in school choice is often framed as a form of involvement in and of itself. In addition, the charter sector has developed a portfolio of market-based strategies that are designed to enhance educational outcomes. For example, outreach programs including parent contracts and parent education workshops are designed to maintain high levels of parental involvement in charters (Bifulco & Ladd, 2006; Smith et al., 2011). These strategies differ from the traditional, bureaucratic measures, such as parent–teacher organizations (PTOs), that typically organize parent–school interactions in public schools. However, scholars continue to debate the extent to which charter schools deliver on their promises to increase parental involvement as a result of what they do, or whether positive outcomes in charter schools result from selection into the school (Angrist et al., 2012; Berends, 2015).

In this article, we compare the ways charter schools and traditional public schools cultivate parental involvement. To conduct these analyses, we combine recent waves of the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) with tax data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), to generate a unique data set describing school efforts to cultivate parental school involvement in a nationally representative sample of U.S. public schools. Consistent with earlier work, we demonstrate that traditional public schools lean relatively heavily on the bureaucratic PTO structure to facilitate and direct parental involvement, while charter schools disproportionately use newer structures. In addition to comparing bureaucratic and market-based strategies, we distinguish between two forms of parental involvement: private-good involvement activities (such as parent–teacher conferences), which parents typically engage in with the intention of conveying benefits directly to their own children; and public-good involvement activities (such as classroom volunteering), which convey benefits more broadly. Our analyses suggest that charter schools have higher levels of both forms of involvement.

But to what extent are the high levels of parental involvement that charter school principals report attributable to the less bureaucratic strategies they enact? And to what degree can traditional public schools expect to increase parental involvement if they replicate the structures or cultural norms associated with charter schools? Examining specific parent involvement strategies enacted by charters as well as their broader cultural and structural work context, we find that higher levels of parental involvement are only partially explained by the practices charter schools use. Parental selection into charter schools is likely a key factor in their higher levels of involvement; several charter school involvement strategies are likely to have weaker or no effects if simply transposed to traditional public schools.

Types of School-Based Parent Involvement

The concept of parental involvement entails a wide range of activities—from checking in on homework at home to volunteering in the classroom or joining a school committee. While nearly all schools seek to involve parents in some capacity, schools vary in the opportunities they provide for parents to participate. Some schools create governance mechanisms that involve parents in deliberations shaping decisions about curriculum, spending, or school personnel (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Malen & Ogawa, 1988). Other schools, meanwhile, deny parents the opportunity to engage in central organizational questions, relegating parents instead to peripheral activities such as fundraising and teacher appreciation events (Epstein, 1992, 2001; Murray et al., 2020). Furthermore, even within the same school, White, affluent, and other high-status parents may have more opportunities for critical involvement than Black and Latino/a, poor, and otherwise marginalized parents (Auerbach, 2007; Baquedano-López et al., 2013; Ishimaru & Takahashi, 2017; Murray et al., 2020; Wilson, 2019).

Distinguishing between private- and public-good parental involvement provides useful leverage for examining the heterogeneity around parental involvement and the structures that provoke it (Park & Holloway, 2017). We use a framework comprised of two components: one that describes activities that primarily benefit the involved parents’ own child as private-good involvement, and the other that describes civic-minded or communal activities that are oriented toward improving the school as a whole, such as fundraising, parent–teacher association (PTA) membership, and volunteering, as public-good involvement. While parents may ultimately pursue public-good involvement activities out of personal interest, these collective activities direct parental energies more broadly, at least potentially producing benefits for students whose parents do not participate (Park & Holloway, 2017).

Charters are expected to design themselves in ways that appeal to parents and are then expected to ensure continued parent involvement. But if parents choose charters because these schools fulfill their private-good desires (an intensive curriculum, a flexible school day, a no-excuses approach, etc.), charters may be more successful in engaging parents in school activities that benefit their own children—like attending a parent–teacher conference one-on-one with their child’s instructor, rather than involving parents in activities that provide a more diffuse benefit to children in the school as a whole—like volunteering in the classroom. Alternatively, charters’ ability to innovate and use alternative strategies for involving parents may have broad effects on both public- and private-good forms of involvement.

Parent Involvement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Existing work on school-based parent involvement finds that charter schools generally exhibit higher levels of involvement than comparable traditional public schools (Becker et al., 1997; Bifulco & Ladd, 2006; Oberfield, 2017; Zimmer & Buddin, 2007). This effect is due to both the activities charters use to engage parents and the selection of parents into charters. Charter schools show consistent positive effects on parent volunteering, though their effects on other forms of involvement, like participation in parent–teacher conferences, school meetings, and decision making, may not be significantly different from their traditional public school counterparts (Buckley, 2007; Hamlin, 2017; Mintrom, 2003; Oberfield, 2020). Bifulco and Ladd (2006) find that parental involvement is higher in charters in both school operations and in school events, with parents more involved in each type of involvement as a result of organizational factors and selection.

Although accounting for selection is a perpetual problem in assessing parent involvement in charters compared with traditional public schools, charters tend to engage in parent involvement strategies less commonly seen in traditional public schools (Becker et al., 1997; Miron & Nelson, 2002; Smith et al., 2011). In contrast, charters are less likely than traditional public schools to have formal PTOs (Murray et al., 2019).

However, there has been a paucity of work that conceptualizes public- and private-good parental involvement and the variation between traditional public and charter schools.¹ Thus, while charters appear to report higher levels of parental involvement than their traditional public school counterparts, this difference may not exist across all forms of parental involvement. However, consistent with the existing literature suggesting charters exhibit higher levels of parental involvement, we hypothesize:

Hypothesis 1: Charters will see higher rates of private- and public-good involvement than traditional public schools.

School-Based Strategies to Facilitate Parent Involvement

Our analyses are designed to assess the extent to which cultural and structural factors explain differences in private- and public-good parental involvement between charter and traditional public schools. We contrast the bureaucratic institutional logic associated with traditional public schools with the market-based logic that many charter schools expound to understand the degree to which these different logics and their accompanying parent outreach strategies and work contexts explain variations in public- and private-good parental involvement between school sectors.

Traditional Public Schools: Bureaucracy and the PTO

Bureaucracy is a form of organizational governance defined by formal rules and hierarchies. As organizations and their functions grow increasingly complex, bureaucracies maximize productivity and predictability by explicitly delineating tasks, roles, and relationships within organizations (Weber, 1946). Public schools bureaucratized during the 20th century as they faced growing enrollments, calls to provide similar functionality across locations, and increased state and federal regulation (Katz, 1971; Tyack, 1974).

We think of the PTO—an organizational form that is more widely used in traditional public schools than in charter schools (Murray et al., 2019)—as a bureaucratic mechanism for cultivating public- and private-good involvement. The first American PTOs emerged during the early 20th century as bureaucratic structures and professional management came to dominate public schools. These organizations provided a structured voice for parents in the increasingly rationalized public education system (Woyshner, 2003). Today the PTO remains a focal organization for generating and managing parental involvement, particularly in traditional public schools (Murray et al., 2020).

PTOs involve parents in both private- and public-good activities, such as communicating with parents about the goals of the school, raising funds, soliciting volunteers, and fostering relationships among parents and teachers (Bryk et al., 2010; Epstein, 2001; Li & Fischer, 2017). The level of influence and reception that a PTO has in the school varies (Lareau & Muñoz, 2012; Quesel et al., 2017). In some schools, PTOs primarily take their agendas from school leaders, advancing these leaders’ plans rather than providing a voice for parent interests, but in others, PTOs act as important vehicles for soliciting and communicating an often diverse range of parent interests. Similarly, the use of a PTO, depending on how it functions, may be a mechanism of inclusion, bringing together diverse constituents across the school, or used to reinforce social divides along class and race lines, privileging White, middle-class ways of being involved (Auerbach, 2007; Baquedano-López et al., 2013; Griffi et al., 2015; Murray et al., 2020; Posey-Maddox, 2012; Wilson, 2019). Nonetheless, in all cases, PTOs provide a widely understood and legitimated organizational form for generating both public- and private-good parental involvement that generally fits well within the structure of traditional public schools.

Charter Schools: A Market-Based Alternative to “Bureaucratic Constraints”

In contrast, charter schools aim to limit overhead bureaucratic control and use market-based mechanisms to increase direct interpersonal cooperation between teachers, parents, and administrators. A foundational principal behind the charter school movement is freedom from bureaucracy in return for greater accountability (Berends, 2015). Allowed to eschew many bureaucratic requirements traditional public schools must adhere to (Buckley & Schneider, 2009), charters are empowered to be innovative, including, potentially, in the ways they involve parents for both public- and private-goods.

The strategies charters use to coordinate parents may thus be tied to a broader market-based ethos in the charter school movement unlike the bureaucratic norms of the traditional public school. Charters use a range of nontraditional and less bureaucratic outreach programs for involving parents, including parent compacts, drop-in centers, and wrap-around services (Bifulco & Ladd, 2006; Smith et al., 2011). Parent compacts most explicitly use a marketplace logic, since they set out a series of terms that parents must agree to for their children to receive educational services from the school. For instance, compacts may mandate a set number of volunteer hours parents must complete or require parents to read with their child each week (Becker et al., 1997). Parent workshops extend this logic, treating parents as additional inputs in the production of children’s educational outcomes, and then investing in training to boost that input’s productivity (Bifulco & Ladd, 2006). Like PTOs, compacts may serve as vehicles for exclusion, potentially deterring economically disadvantaged parents from enrolling their children in charters due to the requirements (Smith et al., 2011; Weiler & Vogel, 2015).

In addition, charters are more likely to exhibit cultural and structural work contexts that reflect market-driven norms and policies. For instance, charters tend to have a more decentralized structure than traditional public schools, giving greater decision-making power to school actors as opposed to the school board or the state (Finnigan, 2007). Similarly, charters are more likely than traditional public schools to eschew unions, collective bargaining, and tenure-based pay-scales, in favor of alternative staffing structures that seek to promote efficiency and to improve educational outcomes by reducing bureaucracy. For instance, charters are more likely to tie teacher evaluation and compensation to student performance (Oberfield, 2016). Teachers with greater self-efficacy engage in more strategies to increase parental involvement (Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2002), and parental involvement is higher when administrators have more autonomy and are able to cultivate parents’ trust and respond to parent demands with flexibility (Adams et al., 2009; Marschall & Shah, 2016). Performance-based pay is intended to motivate teachers to perform at higher levels, with some work showing this to be the case (Lavy, 2007), and accordingly it may encourage teachers to engage with parents to improve student outcomes. However, incentive-driven performance management has also been shown to have mixed effects with reduced buy-in among charter school teachers over time (Mintrop et al., 2018).

Because principals and teachers are important actors in generating parental involvement, these work contexts may prompt charter school leaders to develop a more cooperative, relational climate among school staff, in which all actors are mutually invested in the broader goals of the school and are empowered and motivated to shape school policy, community, and individual educational outcomes.

Therefore, we hypothesize:

Hypothesis 2: The use of these less bureaucratic outreach structures and work contexts helps explain why charter schools have higher levels of private- and public-good involvement than traditional public schools.

The Role of “Choice”

Simply being a “school of choice” may have a positive effect on parental involvement independent of anything specific that charters do. Traditional public schools are, in many cases, default schools for students.² By design, these schools enroll students based on residence, and students attend their local public school unless their families opt out. By contrast, parents make an affirmative choice to enroll their children in charter schools. We suspect that this choice translates into high involvement via two distinct routes. First, the parents who choose their children’s schools are, on average, likely more inclined to be actively involved in schools than parents who attend default neighborhood schools (Becker et al., 1997; Bifulco & Ladd, 2006; Hamlin & Cheng, 2020). The act of choosing a school often requires considerable effort, as parents must research their options, weigh the available information (Altenhofen et al., 2016; Lareau & Goyette, 2014), and often expend additional effort on transportation (Teske et al., 2009). High levels of parental involvement at charters may reflect the characteristics of parents who chose, rather than anything the charter does. In this case, outreach structures and work contexts will not explain the positive relationship between charter schools and higher levels of parental involvement.

Second, the unique characteristics of charters may cultivate distinctive school cultures. Parents choose schools based, in part, on perceived match between school culture and their own values (Schneider & Buckley, 2002). This perceived value alignment may boost parents’ commitment to the school and their ability to form and activate social capital within the school (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987). High levels of commitment and social capital may lead parents who choose their children’s schools to undertake higher levels of private- and public-good parental involvement (Curry et al., 2016).

Furthermore, the process of choice may ensure that the parents who enroll their children in charter schools will participate in nonbureaucratic parental involvement structures and help charters generate a cultural expectation that parents should participate more in school activities to benefit their own child or the school as a whole. If this is the case, a broader schema of how charter parents are expected to respond to the schools may further enhance the positive association between the practices charters implement and involvement, such that charter school parents are more responsive to the parental involvement strategies charters put in place. This also means that less bureaucratic structures, like parental compacts, may be inefficient in a traditional public school where more bureaucratic structures are the expectation. We thus hypothesize that

Hypothesis 3: Charters will see higher returns to private- and public-good parental involvement from less bureaucratic outreach structures and work contexts than traditional schools.

This broader cultural schema about the role of parents that charters can tap into to generate greater parental involvement would presumably not be present even if the same parents enrolled their children in public schools. It is not simply a matter of selection, but these parents in this type of school, that garners more parental involvement. Ultimately, the success of charters in involving parents may be less about how they organize and more about selection and an overarching schema of what parents expect to get and give back to these schools.

Variation Among Charter Schools

Underlying our hypotheses is the assumption that charters are less bureaucratic than traditional public schools. However, charters are a heterogeneous organizational structure and may vary considerably in their levels of bureaucracy. Although the independent charter still makes up the majority of the sector’s population, the sector has seen notable growth in the number of charters that are managed by external organizations, those that are part of a larger network of schools, and those initiated by, or converted from, a traditional public school. Today approximately 35% of charters are managed by for-profit educational management organizations (EMOs) or nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs) (Sullivan, 2019)

These governance structures shape different aspects of charters including enrollment patterns (Lacireno-Paquet, 2004), student achievement (Garcia et al., 2009) and autonomy in the school (Bulkley, 2004), and may similarly shape how parental involvement is enacted by charter schools and the forms of involvement they exhibit. Compared with independent charters, charters run by EMOs or CMOs may be more likely to attempt to create efficiency across their schools by having standardized policies related to hiring, curriculum, or parent outreach (Bulkley, 2004). In this case, the school may be less likely to engage parents at all or may do so in more tightly controlled ways that allow for less autonomy for the principal and teachers in determining the organization and operation of the school.

We do not yet know whether different types of charters generate public- and private-good involvement equally well. Therefore, we explore whether considering the sector as a whole obscures important distinctions in how charters organize parental involvement. If the association between charters and involvement is related to their organizational structure, then we might expect different types of charters to see different levels of private- and/or public-good involvement. In contrast, if all types of charters see equivalent levels of involvement despite different structures, higher levels of involvement may indeed result from selection and unique charter characteristics. We test this second possibility, examining differences in the effect of outreach structures and work contexts on school-based public- and private-good parental involvement between stand-alone charters, charters run by traditional public school districts, and EMO/CMOs.

Data

We use a unique data set derived from three sources. First, we use the SASS and the NTPS, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The SASS uses a repeated cross-sectional design, which allows for trend analysis but not of changes occurring within a school. Conducted between 1987 and 2011, the data include surveys from school administrators as well as a representative sample of teachers from the surveyed schools. After 2010, NCES redesigned the SASS and subsequently released the first wave of the NTPS covering the 2015 to 2016 school year maintaining many of the same questions. To best capture a consistent measure of parent involvement, we restrict our analysis to these two most recent surveys, combining the SASS data from the 2011 to 2012 school year with the NTPS data from the 2015 to 2016 school year. We create our variables for each of the two surveys and the data sets are appended.

Additionally, we combine the SASS and NTPS with data from the NCCS records of nonprofit tax data. Maintained and made available by the Urban Institute, the NCCS files contain records for all tax filing nonprofit organizations that were in operation between the late 1980s to the present. We use the NCCS Business Master files and CORE tax files to identify all parent teacher associations and PTOs that were associated with the SASS/NTPS schools in the year the school was surveyed. In order to qualify for tax exempt status, PTOs are required to file with the IRS. Those with gross receipts in excess of $50,000 are required to file IRS Forms 990 or 990EZ annually, while those below the minimum requirement must file the simplified 990-N postcard at least once every 3 years to maintain active status. This provides a measure of whether the school had a registered tax filing PTO. We restrict our sample to schools that completed the school, principal, and teacher surveys in each survey year, and use listwise deletion for missing data. Our final sample contains 12,070 schools—11,000 traditional public schools and 1,070 charters.

Dependent Variables

Parent Involvement

The SASS and NTPS surveys asked principals “what percentage of students had at least one parent or guardian participating in the following events?” in the prior school year, with a series of activities listed and categorical response choices—0% to 25%, 26% to 50%, 51% to 75%, and 76% to 100%. We use these questions to create two scales capturing parental involvement. While these are perceptions, rather than objective measures, the use of principal reports to assess parental involvement is standard practice (Bifulco & Ladd, 2006; Zimmer & Buddin, 2007).

Private-Good Involvement

We measure the degree to which a school has high private-good involvement (school-based activities primarily benefiting one’s own child), through a scale variable ranging from 1 to 4 with higher values indicating higher involvement in private-good activities. The scale is composed of three measures, indicating whether students had at least one parent attend (a) an open house or back-to-school night, (b) a regularly scheduled school-wide parent-teacher conference, or (c) a special subject area event (e.g., a science fair or concert).

Public-Good Involvement

We measure the degree to which a school has high public-good involvement (school-based parent activities benefiting the school as a whole) with a scale variable ranging from 1 to 4 with higher values reflecting higher involvement in public-good activities. The scale includes four measures, indicating whether students had a parent who (a) volunteered in the school; (b) was involved in school governance through the PTA, PTO, school board, or a parent booster club; and (c) was involved in decisions related to the school budget; or (d) decisions related to instructional issues (e.g., planning classroom learning activities).

While there is some degree of overlap between private- and public-good involvement which complicates its operationalization, we see this as a continuum, in which some activities have a more immediate impact on the parent’s own child, while others are more collective in nature. Our coding reflects each activity’s position on the continuum. Our coding is also aligned with both past empirical work using the SASS that distinguishes between parental involvement in school events and operations (Bifulco & Ladd, 2006) and theoretical distinctions between public- and private-good parental involvement (Park & Holloway, 2017).

Independent Variables

Sector

Our primary independent variable reflects whether a school is a public charter or a traditional public school. For our first set of analyses, we create a dichotomous measure; charter schools are coded as one and traditional public schools are the reference group. For subsequent analyses, we disaggregate charters by governance structure. We create a categorical variable that distinguishes charters that are (a) independent or “stand-alone,” (b) managed by EMOs or CMOs, and (c) managed by a traditional public school district. We combine the EMO and CMO categories due to the small sample sizes of EMO schools (fewer than 50 cases in a given year).

Parent Outreach Structures

Compacts

We create a binary variable coded as 1 if the principal reports any use of parent compacts in the school. Compacts are agreements between parents and the school that acknowledge the school’s policies and often promote a shared responsibility for student learning.

PTO

We measure whether the school has a formal tax-filing PTO that exists in the NCCS nonprofit tax data, as described earlier. Notably, we cannot see who within a school is participating in the PTO; nonetheless, our inclusion of an objective measure of this bureaucratic structure is novel in work on parental involvement in charter schools. Our PTO measure captures the degree to which charters use a very “traditional” bureaucratic form of outreach and if we see the same associations between having a PTO and parental involvement across the sectors.

Workshops

We create a binary variable that reflects whether this form of outreach is offered by the school, coded as 1 if the principal reports any parents attended workshops. Like PTOs, workshops can take many forms and may be more or less parent directed, although we can only capture their existence in the school, not their inner workings.

Cultural and Structural Work Contexts

Reflecting our theory about the role of bureaucratic work contexts on parent involvement, we measure: the level of autonomy and influence afforded to teachers and principals; teachers’ perception of the school climate; staff policies related to compensation, evaluation, and collective bargaining; and finally, the complexity of the school as measured by the number of distinctly titled positions in the school. For each teacher variable, we average the responses among teachers surveyed within the school to create a school-level measure.

Teacher Classroom Control

Teacher classroom control is captured with a scale variable measuring teachers’ perceived level of autonomy in managing their day-to-day classroom interactions in six areas, including selecting the course content and assigning homework (Oberfield, 2016; Paino, 2018). Appendix A provides detail on all variables and scales.

Teacher Influence

Teacher influence is measured with a scale variable reflecting teachers’ perceived degree of influence over seven aspects of school-wide policy, including the school curriculum, discipline, and deciding how the school budget will be spent.

Communal Climate

We use a seven-item scale measuring the degree to which teachers perceive supportive relationships and common values among the school leadership and their fellow teachers—for instance, the degree to which a teacher believes “there is a great deal of cooperative effort among the staff members.”

Principal Influence

Principal influence is measured with a seven-item scale capturing principals’ perceived degree of their own influence over school-wide policy.

Student Performance Evaluation

We include a binary variable measuring whether students’ test score outcomes or growth are included in the formal evaluation of teachers.

Teacher Performance Pay

We include a binary variable of whether performance evaluations are used to determine teachers’ salary increases.

Collective Bargaining

We include a binary variable coded 1 if principals are represented under a meet-and-confer agreement or a collective bargaining agreement. In which meet-and-confer agreements are nonlegally binding, while collective bargaining agreements are legally binding. Zero if neither is available for principals.

Title Count

We use a count variable of the number of distinct staff titles in the school to capture the degree of complexity or differentiation of the school organizational structure.

Controls

We also include a set of control variables relevant to parental involvement and which tend to vary by sector, including those related to the demographics of the students, the demographics of the teachers and principal, and the grades the school serves (see Appendix A).

Analytic Strategy

The analysis proceeds in four steps. First, we use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to examine the relationship between school sector and each of the two types of parental involvement: private- and public-good school-based. We use stepwise regression, initially examining the direct association between being a charter and each type of involvement (net of controls). We then add measures of bureaucratic work contexts and parent outreach structures to the models. Next, we formally test for mediation using the Karlson–Holm–Breen (KHB) method (Breen et al., 2013), which calculates the percent of the charter effect due to indirect effects through other predictors. Third, we explore the possibility that the effects of outreach structures and work contexts vary by sector by adding interactions for charter and all of our key independent variables individually to the models to test for significance. We graph the results of significant interactions. Finally, we explore the possibility of heterogeneity within the charter sector. We limit our sample to just charter schools and use OLS regression to examine the associations between governance structure and each type of parental involvement.

Results

Descriptive Results

Figure 1 displays the mean level of each type of parental involvement in charters and traditional public schools. Consistent with our expectations, charters have a higher rate of public-good involvement. On the 1 to 4 scale, charters have a value of 1.49 compared with traditional public schools’ 1.32—amounting to a difference of just under a third of a standard deviation in overall public-good school involvement. In contrast, private-good parental involvement is both considerably higher and not significantly different between the sectors.

Figure 1.

Mean levels of parent involvement, by sector.

Examining the two sectors’ work contexts and parent outreach structures, charters are less bureaucratically organized than traditional public schools. Both teachers and principals in charters report more personal influence over school-wide policy. Similarly, teachers in charters are more likely to report a mutually supportive climate between their fellow teachers and the school leadership, and charters appear less organizationally complex—with, on average, 12.9 staff titles per school, compared with 15.6 in traditional public schools. Charters are also more likely to tie teacher evaluation and compensation to performance and less likely to enter into collective bargaining agreements with their principals. All work context measures differed significantly across the sectors (at least p < .05).

Our descriptive statistics in Table 1 further reveal that traditional public schools are more likely to use the traditionally bureaucratic form of parent outreach—the PTO, while charter schools are more likely to use parent compacts and parent workshops. While 26% of traditional public schools had a tax-filing PTO, only 10% of charters had this form of parent outreach. In contrast, charters were significantly more likely to use parent compacts, with 84% of charters reporting the use of compacts, compared with only 66% of traditional public schools.

Table 1.

Means and Standard Deviations for Dependent, Independent, and Control Variables, by Sector.

	Traditional public	Charter	Sig.^a	Range
	M (SD)	M (SD)	Sig.^a	Range
Parent involvement
Private-good involvement	2.74 (0.90)	2.75 (0.93)		1-4
Public-good involvement	1.32 (0.52)	1.49 (0.63)	***	1-4
Work contexts
Teacher classroom control	3.29 (0.36)	3.31 (0.44)	*	1-4
Teacher influence	2.18 (0.39)	2.35 (0.50)	***	1-4
Communal climate	3.15 (0.42)	3.22 (0.44)	***	1-4
Principal influence	3.62 (0.34)	3.70 (0.34)	***	1-4
Teacher performance pay	0.07 (0.26)	0.37 (0.48)	***	0, 1
Student performance evaluation	0.46 (0.50)	0.65 (0.48)	***	0, 1
Collective bargaining	0.48 (0.50)	0.22 (0.42)	***	0, 1
Title count	15.56 (3.81)	12.95 (4.34)	***	1-30
Parent outreach
Compacts	0.66 (0.47)	0.84 (0.37)	***	0, 1
PTO	0.26 (0.44)	0.10 (0.31)	***	0, 1
Workshops	0.66 (0.48)	0.76 (0.43)	***	0, 1
Controls
Total students	663.32 (534.06)	553.15 (820.11)	***	10-14,750
White percent	61.20 (32.33)	39.32 (33.65)	***	0-100
FRL approved percent	48.39 (30.03)	49.93 (37.06)		0-100
Title 1 program percent	35.86 (44.80)	48.35 (46.20)	***	0-100
LEP instruction	0.69 (0.46)	0.64 (0.48)	**	0, 1
Urban	0.20 (0.40)	0.54 (0.50)	***	0, 1
School level
Elementary	0.55 (0.50)	0.47 (0.50)	***	0, 1
Secondary	0.33 (0.47)	0.32 (0.46)		0, 1
Combined	0.12 (0.32)	0.22 (0.41)	***	0, 1
Survey year 2015	0.41 (0.49)	0.64 (0.48)	***	0, 1
Teacher non-White percent	13.44 (21.67)	28.71 (29.06)	***	0-100
Teacher experience	14.00 (5.20)	9.03 (5.17)	***	1-50.5
Non-White principal	0.11 (0.31)	0.20 (0.40)	***	0, 1
Female principal	0.44 (0.50)	0.54 (0.50)	***	0, 1
Principal experience	7.16 (6.40)	6.04 (6.22)	***	0-47
N	11,000	1,070

Note. Sample size numbers rounded to the nearest 10, per National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) restricted use data requirements. PTO = parent–teacher organization.

Source. Authors’ calculations based on the NCES’ Schools and Staffing Survey (2011-2012) and National Teacher and Principal Survey (2015-2016), combined with National Center for Charitable Statistics’ Core and Business Master files.

Two-tailed t tests for statistical differences in the means between sectors.

***

p < .001.

Multivariate Results: The Association Between Sector and Types of Parent Involvement

The descriptive statistics obscure important nuance necessary to understand differences between the sectors. Table 2 presents multivariate models predicting private- and public-good involvement. Although the descriptive statistics suggest charter and traditional public schools have equivalent rates of private-good involvement, Model 1 reveals that the association between charter status and private-good parental involvement is suppressed because charters tend to be smaller, serve more non-White students, are less likely to be elementary schools, and are more likely to be Title I schools. After controlling for these differences, charters have higher private-good parental involvement rates than traditional public schools.

Table 2.

OLS Regression Predicting Parents’ Participation in Different Forms of School-Based Involvement.

	Private-good		Public-good
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 1	Model 2
Sector
(Traditional public = ref.)
Charter	.19*** (.03)	.24*** (.03)	.18*** (.02)	.15*** (.02)
Work contexts
Teacher classroom control		.07** (.02)		−.01 (.02)
Teacher influence		.06** (.02)		.03* (.01)
Communal climate		.09*** (.02)		.09*** (.01)
Principal influence		.19*** (.02)		.09*** (.01)
Teacher performance pay		−.05* (.02)		.01 (.02)
Student performance evaluation		−.02 (.02)		.05*** (.01)
Collective bargaining		.06*** (.01)		−.01 (.01)
Title count		.02*** (.00)		−.00** (.00)
Parent outreach
Compacts		.08*** (.02)		.10*** (.01)
PTO		.13*** (.02)		.11*** (.01)
Workshops		.02 (.02)		.07*** (.01)
Constant	2.99*** (.02)	2.89*** (.03)	1.33*** (.01)	1.17*** (.02)

Note. All continuous independent variables centered at the mean. Standard errors in parentheses. All models include the full set of controls listed in Table 1. Following National Center for Education Statistics requirements, the sample size is rounded to the nearest 10 to protect the identities of respondents; N = 12,070. OLS = ordinary least squares; PTO = parent–teacher organization.

Source. Authors’ calculations based on the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey (2011-2012) and National Teacher and Principal Survey (2015-2016), combined with National Center for Charitable Statistics’ Core and Business Master files.

†

p < .10. ^*p < .05. ^**p < .01. ^***p < .001.

We find support for Hypothesis 1; charters report greater private- and public-good involvement. Compared with traditional public schools, charters’ private- and public-good parental involvement rates are .19 and .18 higher—about a third of a standard deviation for private-good involvement (.19/.53 = .36) and a fifth of a standard deviation for public-good involvement (.18/.90 = .20).

Work Contexts and Parent Involvement

In Table 2, we add the measures of cultural and structural work contexts and parent outreach. Results show our work context measures are differently associated with private- and public-good involvement. The staffing variables related to teacher autonomy, perceptions of a communal school climate, and principal influence are all significantly and positively associated with private-good involvement. The number of titled positions in the school and collective bargaining are also positively associated with private-good involvement. In contrast, basing teacher pay on performance is negatively associated with private-good involvement. Thus, we see mixed effects across the more- or less-bureaucratic work structures and their associations with private-good involvement. Reported use of compacts and of having a PTO are both positively associated with private-good parent involvement.

For public-good parent involvement, principal and teachers’ influence, a communal staffing climate, and teachers’ evaluations being based on student performance are significant and positive predictors, with the strongest associations seen for communal climate and principal influence. The number of titled positions has a very small negative association with public-good involvement, while teacher classroom control, collective bargaining and performance pay for teachers are insignificant. Each type of parent outreach—having a PTO, using compacts, and using parent workshops—is positively associated with public-good involvement. Having a PTO, the largest effect, increases public-good parental involvement by .11.

We find, then, that parent outreach structures and work contexts vary in terms of their associations with parental involvement. The strongest and most consistent predictors of each of the two types of parental involvement in the models were principal influence and a communal climate among the work context measures and having a PTO and using compacts among the outreach measures. However, we did not find that less bureaucratic structures uniformly benefited charters in terms of their reported levels of private- and public-good involvement. For instance, parent involvement is higher in the models when schools report more parent outreach programs whether the outreach structure is more or less bureaucratic. Indeed, having a PTO, a very traditional bureaucratic outreach strategy, was positively associated with both types of parental involvement. In contrast, basing teacher compensation on performance is a less bureaucratic employment policy adopted by larger percentages of charters than traditional public schools, but this structure has a negative association with private-good involvement. While our models only show associations and not causal relationships, these finding suggest schools may be able to increase parental involvement through their work contexts and outreach, but schools should be cognizant of the form of parent involvement they want to enhance and understand that some bureaucratic measures positively associate with parental involvement.

Explaining Parental Involvement in Charter Schools

Thus far we have shown that charter principals report higher levels of each type of parental involvement, and charters are more likely to use work contexts and parent outreach structures that are less bureaucratic. We next turn to Hypothesis 2, exploring the extent to which greater parental involvement in charters might be explained by the use of their less bureaucratic culture and structures.

Table 3 presents the results of our mediation analysis, and our results reveal that some, but not all, of the difference in involvement between charter and traditional public schools is mediated by charters’ use of less bureaucratic work contexts and parent outreach structures. First, we see that charter principals’ rating of private-good involvement is .24 higher than traditional public school principals’ ratings, net of controls (this matches what we saw in Table 2). Excluding the controls for work contexts and outreach structures, this difference is .26, suggesting that .028, or about 10.69% of the overall charter school advantage in private-good involvement is mediated through these work contexts and outreach structures. In Table 3, we include each of the significant mediators in our models and show their contribution to the coefficient and what percent of the overall charter effect they mediate. We find that principal influence accounts for about 6.0% of the total charter school advantage in the full private-good model, while the other mediating predictors, teacher influence and compacts, each account for about 2.3% of the total charter advantage on private-good involvement. Thus, we do see some evidence that charters’ higher private-good involvement is related to their less bureaucratic cultural and structural organization, although the majority of the charter advantage remains even after controlling for these differences. Despite some evidence of mediation, the charter coefficient increases in Model 2 of Table 2 for private-good involvement. This is because charters are less likely to have PTOs than traditional schools, and are more likely to use performance pay. Failing to control for these differences between sectors reduces the association between charters and involvement as seen in Model 1. Once we account for charters’ lower likelihood of having a PTO and greater likelihood of using performance pay, the charter advantage grows stronger in Model 2 despite evidence of simultaneous mediation through other variables of interest.

Table 3.

KHB Mediation Analysis and Decomposition.

	Private-good			Public-good
	Estimate	SE	Mediation (%)	Estimate	SE	Mediation (%)
Combined effect of significant mediators
Total effect	.264***	.028		.174***	.011
Direct effect	.236***	.028		.145***	.012
Indirect effect	.028***		10.69	.029***		16.60
Significant mediators and their contribution to the indirect effect
Teacher influence	.006	.002	2.39	—	—	—
Principal influence	.016	.003	5.99	.006	.001	3.62
Title count	—	—	—	.010	.003	5.55
Compact	.006	.002	2.31	.010	.002	5.53
Workshop	—	—	—	.003	.001	1.90

Note. The KHB method is suitable for testing mediation in generalized linear models including ordinary least squares regression. All continuous independent variables have been centered at the mean. Results shown for significant mediators. All additional controls and covariates are included in the models. N = 12,070. KHB = Karlson–Holm–Breen method; SE = standard error.

Source. Authors’ calculations based on the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey (2011-2012) and National Teacher and Principal Survey (2015-2016), combined with National Center for Charitable Statistics’ Core and Business Master files.

***

p < .001.

For involvement in public-good activities, Table 3 reveals a similar story. Overall, charter schools’ work context and outreach structures explain 16.6% of the total charter advantage in public-good parental involvement. The number of titled positions in a school and the use of compacts each account for about 5.5% of the total charter advantage, followed by principal influence (3.6%) and using workshops (1.9%). Each mediator has a significant indirect effect driving a portion of the association between being a charter and public-good involvement. After controlling for these mediators, the total charter advantage is reduced from .17 to .15. Hypothesis 2 predicted that the use of less bureaucratic outreach structures and work contexts will mediate charter school effects on each type of parent involvement. We find evidence supporting Hypothesis 2, but only to a limited degree. Charter status remains a significant predictor in our full models regardless of outcome. A less bureaucratic cultural and structural organization may be meaningful for charters but only partially explains why they exhibit more private- and public-good parental involvement than traditional public schools.

Are the Same Activities Associated With Involvement in Charters and Traditional Publics?

Much of the remaining association between charter status and involvement is likely due to selection, since parents who choose to enroll their children in a charter may have a greater tendency to be involved. But this may also reflect a broader schema or cultural expectation within charters that parents engaging in school choice have a greater personal responsibility to participate in school activities and decision making. Hypothesis 3 predicts that charters should see higher returns to less bureaucratic outreach structures and work contexts than traditional schools if such a schema exists. We test this by interacting charter status and our outreach and context measures. We theorize that some of the benefit of being a charter would come from their ability to garner more involvement from the structures they have in place, and we find some support for the idea that parental involvement structures operate differently across the sectors.

For private-good involvement we find two significant interactions: charters see greater benefits to compacts and principal influence than what is seen in traditional public schools. A traditional public school without compacts has a predicted value of 2.67 on the 1 to 4 point scale of private-good involvement, while a traditional school with them has a predicted value of 2.74 (Figure 2), or an increase in about .08 standard deviations in private-good involvement. In contrast, in charter schools, the use of compacts results in an increase of the prediction from 2.77 to 2.96 (.21 SD). Similarly, principal influence has a different relationship with private-good involvement by sector (Figure 3). We see significantly different effects between the sectors at the high end of the principal influence scale, with the effect of principal influence stronger for charters. The reported use of compacts and principals’ perceived influence convey a stronger effect on private-good involvement in charters than in traditional public schools.

Figure 2.

Predicted private-good involvement based on sector and whether school uses compacts.

Figure 3.

Predicted private-good involvement based on principal’s reported level of influence in the school.

For public-good parental involvement we also find two significant interactions by sector: whether the school has a PTO and the number of titled positions in the school. For both traditional public schools and charters, having a PTO is associated with increased public-good involvement but the association between PTOs and public-good involvement is stronger for charters (Figure 4). For titled positions we see opposite interactions across the sectors. In Table 2, we saw that the coefficient for title count was negative and statistically significant, but very small (<.00). Here we see that the overall coefficient obscures the difference between the sectors. As the number of titled positions in a traditional public school increases, this is associated with a decline in public-good involvement (Figure 5). But as the number of titled positions in a charter increases, this is associated with an increase in public-good involvement.

Figure 4.

Predicted public-good involvement based on sector and whether school has a PTO.

Figure 5.

Predicted public-good involvement based on count of staff titles in the school.

Although we do find that the measures operate differently across sectors, we find no evidence that less bureaucratic outreach structures and work contexts are associated with the greatest benefit to charters’ parent involvement. Similarly, we did not find that the effect of having a PTO varied across sectors for private-good involvement. Although it is a traditionally bureaucratic form and charters are less likely to have PTOs, our results do not suggest that this form of outreach may be less beneficial for charter schools when they exist. Ultimately, we find limited support for Hypothesis 3 that charters will see stronger associations between less bureaucratic outreach structures and work contexts and parent involvement than traditional public schools. We find this to be the case for two measures that are less bureaucratic—principal influence and compacts—for private-good involvement. But for public-good involvement charters appear to gain more from a more bureaucratic social and structural organization.

How Homogeneous Is the Charter Sector?

We are further interested in the degree to which each type of involvement may vary within the charter sector. For public-good involvement in particular, the descriptive statistics in Table 1 reveal the standard deviation of the mean is greater in the charter sector than the traditional sector. This supports our expectation that there may be a greater degree of variation within the charter sector in the levels of parent involvement.

Descriptive statistics (available on request from the corresponding author) reveal differences in the use of school structures among different types of charters as well as small differences in the levels of private- and public-good parental involvement. However, our OLS regression predicting the types of parent involvement based on charter governance structure in Appendix B, suggests charter governance structure is not significantly related to levels of either public- or private-good parental involvement in charter schools. Once we control for basic demographic differences between the types of charters, we do not find any significant differences between the charter governance structures on the two forms of involvement. Thus, while there has been a significant amount of public and political attention paid to the rise of EMOs/CMOs and concern that the entrance of external organizations and profit-motives in public schooling are undermining both the traditional public school system and the original goals of the charter school movement, ultimately we find that, in terms of parental involvement, these schools look much like other charters.

Conclusion

While still serving a relatively small proportion of the public school students in the United States, the charter school sector is growing, and school choice is now an established element of the public school landscape. Simultaneously the incentives for parents to be actively involved in schools are increasing. In this work, we examined the ways in which school outreach structures and work contexts across the charter and traditional sectors account for variation in parental involvement in two forms—private and public. While existing research finds that charters have higher rates of parents volunteering but a mixed relationship with other forms of involvement (Buckley, 2007; Hamlin, 2017; Mintrom, 2003; Oberfield, 2020), we found that charters exhibit higher parental involvement in both public- and private-good involvement net of controls.

We find evidence that some strategies charter schools use to involve parents, such as principal and teacher influence, compacts, workshops, and the number of titles in a school, explain a portion of why they have more parental involvement. However, these mechanisms operate differently for private- and public-good parental involvement. And, we ultimately find that while charters are more likely to use less bureaucratic outreach structures and to have an empowered climate for school staff, these factors explain only a small proportion of the charter school advantage on parental involvement.

What do these findings mean for educational policy and practice? Given the high levels of involvement that we observe at charter schools, should traditional public schools emulate charter school practices? First, not all of the less bureaucratic measures more common in charters were positively associated with parent involvement. Performance-pay for teachers was negatively associated with private-good involvement; thus, the adoption of market-based policies to enhance educational outcomes should be carefully considered in light of the outcome one hopes to enhance. Second, given the limited extent to which specific charter school practices—such as parent contracts and parent workshops—explain high levels of involvement, we argue that traditional schools cannot simply emulate charter schools by adopting practices associated with charters. And, it is unlikely that an uncritical adoption of these practices will shift the overall landscape of parental involvement in U.S. schools. Our findings suggest that parental involvement is a product of a specific type of parent in a specific type of school. That said, we note that our data do not allow us to comprehensively analyze the outreach practices and work contexts that differentiate charters and traditional public schools. Qualitative work on charters and effective practices in schools suggests many types of outreach that our data do not capture such as mandated volunteer hours (Smith et al., 2011), and there remains the possibility of mediators that we were not able to test that may have a stronger effect if applied in traditional schools. Additional research should analyze these practices and the role they play in producing parental involvement in charters and traditional public schools.

Future work should explore why some organizational cultural and structural factors more effectively facilitate involvement in charters than in traditional public schools. Do charters implement these practices differently than traditional public schools? For instance, are compacts more successful in charters because they have the “teeth” to enforce them, or because charter school parents expect this kind of mutual commitment and therefore react positively to these forms of outreach? In contrast, in traditional public schools, such outreach may be enacted in a more performative way or even responded to negatively if parents perceive the school is mandating parental involvement with a deficiency approach. Surprisingly, we found that two more bureaucratic structures—the PTO and number of titles in the school—are also more highly associated with public-good involvement in charters than traditional public schools. Although these data cannot explain why, these findings speak to the need to consider public- and private-good parental involvement as distinct, with different factors that may shape them. And, they may indicate that because parents select into a school where they expect there to be more involvement, any structure that helps facilitate that participation, whether bureaucratic or not, enhances participation.

We note, however, some important limitations in our measurement of parental involvement. First, our dependent variables come from principal reports. While this is consistent with much of the literature on parental involvement in schools (Becker et al., 1997; Bifulco & Ladd, 2006; Mintrom, 2003; Zimmer & Buddin, 2007), more work should examine parent involvement from other perspectives, including that of teachers and parents (see, e.g., Buckley, 2007; Oberfield, 2017, 2020). Principals, in particular, may be motivated to portray high levels of parental involvement, recognizing it as a valued outcome in the schools. Despite this, our confidence in our results is bolstered by recent work using parent survey reports that show similar trends of reported higher involvement in schools of choice including charter schools (Hamlin & Cheng, 2020). Additionally, our measures only speak to school-based parental involvement. Understanding how parents also contribute to their children’s education via home-based involvement may help disentangle the effects of selection versus the effects of school-based structures. Additionally, school leaders frequently fail to recognize the roles that Black and Latino/a parents play in their children’s schooling (Baquedano-López et al., 2013; Wilson, 2019). This principal blind spot could similarly bias our findings, particularly if it is more acute among charter leaders than traditional public school leaders or vice versa. However, as charters tend to enroll higher percentages of minority students than traditional public schools, we would expect charter principals to underestimate parental involvement in their schools, making our analysis a more conservative test biased against the higher levels of involvement that we ultimately find.

Based on our findings, we argue that traditional public schools cannot simply reproduce charter school structures in an attempt to replicate the high levels of involvement we observe among charters. While charters report higher levels of public- and private-good involvement than traditional public schools, charters likely have this association because involved parents select these types of schools and because these parents see themselves as partners in the educational enterprise in ways that cannot simply be translated in traditional public schools.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-eaq-10.1177_0013161X21990431 – Supplemental material for Practicing Parental Involvement: Heterogeneity in Parent Involvement Structures in Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-eaq-10.1177_0013161X21990431 for Practicing Parental Involvement: Heterogeneity in Parent Involvement Structures in Charter and Traditional Public Schools by Rebecca L. Boylan, Amy Petts, Linda Renzulli, Thurston Domina and Brittany Murray in Educational Administration Quarterly

Footnotes

Appendix A

Detailed Description of Variable Coding.

Variable	Variable description
Dependent variables
Private-good school-based involvement	Scale variable capturing whether in the prior year students had at least one parent who attended (1) open house or back-to-school nights; (2) regularly scheduled school-wide parent-teacher conferences; and, (3) special subject area events (e.g., science fair, concerts; 1-4: 0%-25%, 26%-50%, 51%-75%, and 76%-100%; NA responses coded as “1”; α = .78)
Public-good school-based involvement	Scale variable capturing whether students had at least one parent who (1) volunteered in the school as needed on a regular basis; (2) was involved in school governance though the PTA, PTO, school board, or a parent booster club; (3) was involved in decisions related to the school budget; and, (4) was involved in decisions related to instructional issues (e.g., planning classroom learning activities or providing feedback on curriculum; 1-4: 0%-25%, 26%-50%, 51%-75%; and 76%-100%; NA responses coded as “1”; α = .80)
Key independent variables
Charter	School is a public charter (0, 1)
Teacher classroom control	Teachers’ perception of control in the classroom over six items: (1) selecting textbooks and other instructional materials; (2) selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught; (3) selecting teaching techniques; (4) evaluating and grading students; (5) disciplining students; and (6) determining the amount of homework to be assigned (1-4: no control/minor control/moderate control/a great deal of control; α = .77) Responses averaged across all surveyed teachers in the school.
Teacher influence	Teachers’ perception of influence in the school over seven items: (1) setting performance standards for students at this school; (2) establishing curriculum; (3) determining the content of in-service professional development programs; (4) evaluating teachers; (5) hiring new full-time teachers; (6) setting discipline policy; and (7) deciding how the school budget will be spent (1-4: no influence/minor influence/moderate influence/a great deal of influence; α = .81) Responses averaged across all surveyed teachers in the school.
Communal climate	Extent to which teachers agree with the following seven statements regarding the climate of the school: (1) the school administration’s behavior toward the staff is supportive and encouraging; (2) my principal enforces school rules for student conduct and backs me up when I need it; (3) rules for student behavior are consistently enforced by teachers in this school, even for students who are not in their classes; (4) most of my colleagues share my beliefs and values about what the central mission of the school should be; (5) the principal knows what kind of school he or she wants and has communicated it to the staff; (6) there is a great deal of cooperative effort among the staff members; (7) in this school, staff members are recognized for a job well done (1-4: strongly agree/agree/disagree/strongly disagree [Reverse coded so higher responses reflect greater agreement]; α = .86) Responses averaged across all surveyed teachers in the school.
Principal influence	Principals’ perception of influence in the school over seven items: (1) setting performance standards for students at this school; (2) establishing curriculum; (3) determining the content of in-service professional development programs; (4) evaluating teachers; (5) hiring new full-time teachers; (6) setting discipline policy; and (7) deciding how the school budget will be spent (1-4: no influence/minor influence/moderate influence/a great deal of influence; α = .61)
Student performance evaluation	Whether students’ test score outcomes or test score growth is included in formal evaluation of teachers in the school (0, 1)
Teacher performance pay	Whether performance evaluations were used to determine teacher salary increases (0, 1)
Collective bargaining	Whether principals are represented under a meet-and-confer agreement or a collective bargaining agreement (1 if either type of agreement, 0 if neither).
Title count	Count of unique full-time and part-time staff titles filled in the school (i.e., part-time principal, full-time principal . . . full-time custodian, etc.)
Compact	Whether the school used school–parent compacts in the prior year. Coded as 1 if the principal reported any percent of parents signing a compact, and 0 if they reported this as a “nonapplicable” form of involvement.
PTO	Whether the school has a formal tax-filing PTO
Workshops	Whether the school used parent education workshops or courses in the prior year. Coded as 1 if the principal reported any percent of parents participated in workshops, and 0 if they reported this as a “nonapplicable” form of involvement.
Controls
Log-total students	Total number of K-12 students enrolled in the fall of 2011 and 2015, logged
Student White percent	Percentage of students who are White, not of Hispanic or Latino origin
FRL approved percent	Percentage of students who are approved for free or reduced-price lunches
Title 1 program percent	Percentage of students who participate in the Title I program
LEP/ELL	School offers instruction designed to address the needs of students with limited-English proficiency/English language learners (0, 1)
Urban	School is located in urban area. NCES created variable based on census population and geography information. (0, 1)
School level	Categorical indicator of the grade levels served by the school. Ref = elementary
Elementary	School has any of Grades K-6 and none of Grades 9 to 12
Secondary	School has any of Grades 7 to 12 and none of Grades K-6 (0, 1)
Combined	All other cases that serve grades across identified levels (0, 1)
Survey15	Survey year is 2015. (0, 1) ref = survey year 2011
Teacher non-White percent	Percentage of teachers who are of a racial/ethnic minority
Teacher experience	Years of experience as a teacher
Non-White principal	Principal self-identifies as non-White (0, 1)
Female principal	Principal self-identifies as female (0, 1)
Principal experience	Years served as the principal at this or any other school

Note. PTO = parent–teacher organization; PTA = parent–teacher association; NCES = National Center for Education Statistics.

Appendix B

OLS Regression Predicting Parents’ Participation in Different Types of Involvement, Among Charters.

	Private-good		Public-good
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 1	Model 2
Charter governance
(Independent = ref.)
EMO/CMO	−.03 (.06)	.05 (.06)	.01 (.04)	.03 (.05)
Part of traditional public	.11 (.07)	.09 (.07)	.06 (.05)	.03 (.05)
Work contexts
Teacher classroom control		.15* (.07)		.05 (.06)
Teacher influence		.09 (.07)		.00 (.05)
Communal climate		.07 (.06)		.11* (.05)
Principal influence		.30*** (.07)		.13* (.06)
Teacher performance pay		−.10^† (.05)		−.03 (.04)
Student performance evaluation		.08 (.05)		.08^† (.04)
Collective bargaining		.04 (.06)		.14** (.05)
Title count		.01^† (.01)		.00 (.01)
Parent outreach
Compacts		.12^† (.07)		.13* (.05)
PTO		.20* (.08)		.15* (.06)
Workshops		.08 (.06)		.03 (.05)
Constant		3.00*** (.12)		1.42*** (.09)

Note. Thirty charters reported an “other” governance structure, they were removed from the analysis sample. All continuous independent variables centered at the mean. Standard errors in parentheses. All models include the full set of controls listed in Table 1. Following NCES data requirements, the sample size is rounded to the nearest 10 to protect the identities of respondents; N = 1,040. OLS = ordinary least squares; PTO = parent–teacher organization; EMO = educational management organization; CMO = charter management organization; NCES = National Center for Education Statistics.

†

p < .10. ^*p < .05. ^**p < .01. ^***p < .001.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Numbers SES-1626891) and by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant Numbers P2C HD042849 [Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin]). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health.

ORCID iDs

Rebecca L. Boylan

Amy Petts

Thurston Domina

Notes

Author Biographies

Rebecca L. Boylan is a research associate on the National Study of Learning Mindsets in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores the factors that shape students’ movement through educational institutions over time, and as part of collaborative teams she conducts work on charter schools and on learning mindsets.

Amy Petts is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Purdue University. Her research explores how inequalities are embedded in social institutions. She focuses primarily on educational inequalities and contemporary forms of racism.

Linda Renzulli is a professor of sociology and department head in the Department of Sociology at Purdue University. Her scholarly interests include sociology of education, organizational change, and stratification. Her work concentrates on schools as organizations, examining the causes and consequences of student stratification that result from the development of charter schools. She is also interested in the family school nexus to better understand educational opportunities and constraints.

Thurston Domina is a professor of educational policy and organizational leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A sociologist by training, Domina works with educational practitioners to better understand the relationship between education and social inequality in the contemporary U.S.

Brittany Murray is an assistant professor of educational and political science at Davidson College. Her research examines the relationship between social and political processes in schools and educational inequality. She uses mixed-methods to investigate relationships between race, parents, the organization of schools, and the distribution of school resources and learning opportunities.

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