On Top of the News
White House to Host PTA Day
ED.gov| August 10, 2012

Behind the Headline
Not Your Mother’s PTA
Education Next | Winter 2012

Today the White House hosts 150 PTA (Parent Teacher Association) leaders and honors 12 of them as Champions of Change. But in an article from the Winter 2012 issue of Education Next, Bruno Manno questioned whether PTAs are the real Champions of Change.

Truth be told, few in today’s K–12 education reform movement look to the PTA to fight for dramatic change or engage in direct conflict with the public education establishment. Education historian William Cutler explains in Parents and Schools that “educators and most school board members prefer to think of the parent-teacher association as an extension of the educational establishment, ‘an auxiliary to the public school,’ as the Los Angeles County Board of Education put it in 1908.”

Several other groups that empower parents to make their voices and choices a primary catalyst of school reform are profiled in the article, “Not Your Mother’s PTA.”

-Education Next