Featured Research Projects

Families, Communities, and Schooling in a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic caused relationships between families, schools, and communities to shift dramatically. Disruption to in-person learning limits families’ access to school buildings and all of the social and material resources embedded within these organizations. Families face tough decisions about which types of schools, instructional formats, and COVID-19 mitigation strategies are best, making impossible tradeoffs between their children’s education and health and safety. And yet, in this era of uncertainty, opportunities to re-imagine schooling to facilitate better communication, broader accessibility, and strides toward equity and inclusion are plentiful.

Relevant Scholarship:

Domina, T., Renzulli, L., Murray, B., Garza, A. N., & Perez, L. (2021). Remote or removed: Predicting successful engagement with online learning during COVID-19. Socius.

Parent Collective Involvement and Racial Inequality in Diverse Schools

Despite decades of education policies directed toward increasing minority parent involvement, white parents remain more involved and reap more educational benefits from their involvement than any other racial/ethnic group. Dr. Murray’s dissertation examines how collective processes among parents in school-based associations such as parent-teachers organizations (PTOs) contribute to persistent racial inequalities in relationships between families and schools and how those unequal relationships reinforce larger patterns of inequality in students’ experiences in school. This mixed-methods study leverages qualitative data from observations of PTO meetings and interviews with parents, teachers, and administrators from nine NC elementary schools. These data are used to complement quantitative data from Internal Revenue Service filings on North Carolina PTOs paired with administrative data on the schools they support. Data collection for this work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation led by Drs. Linda Renzulli of Purdue University and Thurston Domina of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Manuscript preparation is supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.

Relevant Scholarship:

Boylan, R. L., Petts, A., Renzulli, L., Domina, T., & Murray, B. (2021). Practicing parental involvement: Heterogeneity in parent Involvement structures in charter and traditional public schools. Educational Administration Quarterly.

Murray, B., Domina, T., Petts, A., Renzulli, L., & Boylan, R. (2020). “We’re in this together”: Bridging and bonding social capital in elementary school PTOs. American Educational Research Journal.

Murray, B., Domina, T., Renzulli, L., & Boylan, R. (2019). Civil society goes to school: Parent-teacher associations and the equality of educational opportunity. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

Private Money in Public Schools

PTOs, called “Dream Hoarders” by modern scholars, are enduring pathways for parents to collectively invest tax-exempt dollars into U.S. public schools. Charitable contributions from these organizations have grown exponentially in recent years, and those raising the most form in communities serving predominantly white and affluent families. Realized as new facilities, equipment, field trips, extra-curricular programming, and more staff, the unequal distribution of PTO resources goes largely unchecked by school leaders as PTOs maintain their reputation as innocuous, social clubs. However, recent scholars draw attention to their role in reproducing structural inequalities between and within schools. This body of work more closely examines the role they play in maintaining or exacerbating academic achievement gaps using district-wide performance data from the Stanford Education Data Archive. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, Dr. Brittany Murray and James S. Carter, III of UNC-Chapel Hill engaged in a robust matching process to pair tax data from PTAs across the nation to schools they support to examine relationships between state and local funding sources, segregation trends, and academic inequalities with PTO resources.

Relevant Scholarship:

Murray, B. C. (2019). PTAs, parent involvement, and the challenges of relying on private money to subsidize public education. Phi Delta Kappan.

Segregation, Resources, & School District Secession

The legacies of the 1970’s Supreme Court cases: “Millikan v. Bradley,” where the court significantly curtailed desegregation efforts by limiting their ability to cross district boundaries and “San Antonio v. Rodriguez,” which left funding equity up to states, create opportunities for white, affluent parents to separate from their local public school districts to achieve more socioeconomically and racially homogenous catchment areas. This school district secession is a growing phenomenon in diverse districts across the nation and are assumed to deepen inter-district stratification of resources, access, and opportunity. Dr. Eric Houck of UNC-Chapel Hill and Dr. Brittany Murray investigate the relationship between district secession and educational equity by showing how school funding and racial salience both predict and respond to local decisions to increase fragmentation in school governance structures.

Relevant Scholarship:

Houck, E. A., & Murray, B. C. (2019). Left behind: District secession and the re-segregation of American schools. Peabody Journal of Education.