When the PTA Is Not Built for You: Black Fugitivity in Parent Engagement

• In Event: Toward Understandings of Fundraising PTAs as Sites for Exclusion, Engagement, and (In)Equity

Abstract

Empirical studies have long demonstrated a relationship between student academic achievement and parent involvement (Christenson et al., 1992; Epstein, 1991; Singh et al., 1995). At the same time, Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) - the central organizing engine of parent participation - are recognized by researchers as spaces of exclusion (Abrams & Gibbs, 2002) that reproduce unequal outcomes (Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Murray et al., 2019; Posey-Maddox, 2013). Additionally, non-dominant families' expertise and cultural capital are often overlooked and devalued in school environments (Diamond & Gomez, 2004; Ishimaru et al., 2016).
Existing research highlights the experiences of Black mothers who participated in PTAs and notes the anti-Blackness within these organizations (Blanton et al., 2021; McCarthy Foubert, 2022, 2023). However, aside from the discourse of disengagement, very little scholarship has been dedicated to investigating how Black mothers participate despite PTA exclusion, creating their own subversive pathways toward Black educational futures.
Through the theoretical framework of Black fugitivity, this paper explores how Black Mothers resist and refuse anti-Blackness within their schools' ecosystem. It will investigate how they navigate through and around PTAs, creating fugitive spaces and engaging in political acts of defiance. It also sheds light on exclusionary structures and practices of parent-teacher organizations that mandate these subversive, communal, and risky acts of fugitivity. The following questions guided the study's inquiry:
How do Black mothers conceptualize their sense of belonging in PTAs?
When Black mothers take action toward improving the educational experience of Black students, how do they navigate the school environment to achieve their goals?
Countering the dominant narrative of Black mothers' engagement in schools, particularly in PTAs, this critical inquiry draws on data from 20 in-depth interviews of primarily middle-income, suburban Black mothers active in their children's school community. This qualitative approach allows for the adequate interrogation of complex racialized experiences and the power dynamics involved while allowing for the congruences and divergences of their narratives to be captured (Banks-Wallace, 2002).
Three overarching themes have emerged from the preliminary findings.
Black mothers experience PTA organizations as anti-Black, exclusionary spaces upheld by vigilant gatekeeping. They participate in these organized settings only when seeking specific benefits for their children, understanding PTAs as social networks through which information and access can flow.
Even when Black mothers take a leadership position in the PTA, their attempts to deconstruct institutionalized anti-blackness are met with resistance from the PTA and school administration. Hence, they learned to rely on community organizing and activism tactics such as protests, petitions, and community marches for racial salient issues - which often clashed with PTA leadership and the administration, increasing the precarity of their positions.
They created and sustained Black-centered spaces where communally, they grappled with the anti-Black realities while plotting their next step toward Black educational futurities. These were also spaces for rest and reprieve from the struggle.

A better understanding of PTAs' exclusionary harms and added labor they necessitate for Black Mothers may help inform institutional changes in service of more equitable outcomes.

Author

• Karla R. Thomas, Northwestern University