The Washington Post reported on October 19 that PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) membership nationwide has fallen from 12.1 million four decades ago to fewer than six million today. Not even one in four U.S. public schools now has a PTA chapter.
What a pity, you say. This benign, honorable, virtuous school-betterment organization of your youth is sputtering. How could that be?
Some would have you think it's due to today's hyper-busy lifestyles, family decay, and the disinclination and/or inability of parents to involve themselves with their children's schools.
Wrong. Parents opting out of the PTA are not abandoning their kids' schools. Instead, many of them are starting their own school-specific groups, commonly known as Parent-Teacher Organizations, or PTO's. All of the energy and dues of a PTO generally go into projects and activities at one's own child's school—be they supplies for the art room, band uniforms, lights for the night football games, after-school programs, or the ninth grade trip to Colonial Williamsburg. Parents typically pay dues but may also raise money through festivals, car washes, bake sales, magazine subscription sales, and so forth. If the PTO gets involved with school policy, it's usually directly with the principal and it's apt to address immediate issues facing the particular school.
But isn't the PTA just like that, too? Once, yes. But like so many other once-useful organizations (the League of Women Voters comes to mind, along with the American Civil Liberties Union), it's been politicized, ideologized, bureaucratized and, at least in the PTA's case, has become part of the public-education establishment, more interested in propping up institutional claims and employee interests than advancing the interests of parents and kids. "All T and no P" is how I've come to describe the National PTA and its state affiliates.
No doubt some school level chapters of the PTA still do some good. But now there's a vast hierarchy in which the needs of Elementary School X or High School Y are subordinated to policy and politics at the district, state, and national levels. Accordingly, in a near perfect facsimile of the teacher unions, the PTA has built a multi-story organization with paid staff at every level, with "issues" it agitates on behalf of at every level of government, and with non-trivial fractions of parents' dues money siphoned off to support activities remote from their children's schools.
The National PTA gets $1.75 from every member's dues. (Multiply by 6 million and you have a tidy little budget with which to lobby Congress and pay executives.) The state PTA keeps between 50 cents and 5 dollars of each member's dues. This adds up fast. Parents at a Phoenix elementary school found that more than half of their PTA's dues money was vanishing into state and national PTA coffers. At the District of Columbia's Coolidge High School, $3 of every $10 went to support district-wide and national budgets. "We just don't see the benefit" of doing that, says the vice president of Coolidge's new PTO, which replaced the PTA last spring. "It killed me," said a parent leader at the Phoenix school, which also converted from PTA to PTO. "We were sending them money and not getting anything in return."
What do the state and national dues pay for? Again like the teacher unions—the national PTA for years had its Washington office in the NEA's grand headquarters building at 16th and M—these millions pay for professional staff and lobbyists, as well as newsletters, conventions, websites, and assorted other paraphernalia of a politically active organization in the modern era.
What sort of lobbying? Exactly the same as the teacher unions. I can't name a single policy issue of consequence at the state or national level where the PTA's testimony doesn't mirror that of the NEA and/or AFT. This is true on No Child Left Behind. On school finance lawsuits and appropriations. And especially, and most reprehensibly, on issues of school choice of every sort. One might think an organization purporting to look after the parents of school children would do all it could to maximize their education options, to close down bad schools, to assure families the right and the means to leave for better schools, be they district schools, inter-district schools, charter schools, private schools, home schools, virtual schools, or whatever.
But one would be wrong. The PTA is at the state legislature or Congress, along with the unions (and the rest of what Bill Bennett terms "the blob"), lobbying against the rights of parents and children and in favor of the interests of institutions and their adult employees.
All T and no P indeed.
And by being an echo of the public-school establishment rather than a voice for parents and children, the PTA has marginalized itself. "The PTA is not a major player on the major education issues," says the Urban Institute's Jane Hannaway. "People look at what impacts them most immediately," says the Progressive Policy Institute's Andrew Rotherham. "Some of these big issues that the PTA [is] talking about don't speak to [parents] on a day-to-day level."
No wonder chapters are closing and member rolls plummeting. What's more, it's getting easier to create a PTO instead. The Post reports that change-minded parents are "aided by Web sites and Internet message boards that give detailed instructions on how to dissolve their chapter, write bylaws for a new PTO and register as a nonprofit group with the Internal Revenue Service."
For a long time now, America has needed a bona fide organization of parents to serve as counterweight to the public-school establishment, an organization of education consumers to offset the producers' relentless self-seeking. The PTA has never been that, but its existence has made it harder for anyone else to fill the void. If the PTA shrinks to insignificance, others will find it easier to demonstrate the need and create the necessary organizational arrangements. But the education establishment knows that, too—and can therefore be counted upon to prop up the PTA, empty shell though it may be, lest it be replaced by an entity that truly looks after the interests of parents and kids.
"PTOs lure Parents sick of split PTA dues," by Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, October 19, 2004