coe-staff: Invitation: EDST TTF Search Finalist Colloquium Mon 12/2

[Education Dean]

The Education Studies department invites you to attend a colloquium presented by Dr. Claire Mackevicius

Monday December 2, 2:30-3:30pm

HEDCO 230T or via Zoom (link below)

Pastries, coffee, and tea provided



Colloquium title: Stealth Inequities in K-12 Public Schools: How Fundraising PTAs Entrench Hierarchies and Exploring Pathways Toward Equity

Description: Decades of legislative and judicial efforts have resulted in more equitably distributed government revenues across K-12 public schools, which has weakened the link between community wealth and public school resources. At the same time, fundraising PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations, Organizations, and “Friends Of” groups), non-profit organizations providing supplemental private resources to especially more affluent public schools, have grown dramatically in number and size. Fundraising PTAs are unaccounted for in school funding research and policy, representing a hidden source of inequities in resources across public schools. Across quantitative and qualitative explorations, I interweave stratification economics and racialized organizations theorizing to better understand the realities of fundraising PTAs at public schools. I use quasi-experimental techniques to test the literature's dominant presumption that fundraising PTAs plug government budget holes. On average, changed government spending does not lead to shifts in PTA spending. However, there is differential responsiveness across district racial contexts. I explore this further in descriptive analyses of within-district PTA resource distribution, finding economic and racial inequities only revealed by analyzing across schools in the same district. Finally, I study a setting where there has been a recent effort to lessen within-district PTA resource inequities. I apply sensemaking and frame analysis to analyze interviews I conducted with parents and caregivers in a district with a grassroots effort to pool and redistribute PTA funds. I find that the initiative gained coalitional support by accommodating a range of solutions framings, which allowed a broad set of advocates to negotiate resonance with the initiative’s approach. Throughout these investigations into fundraising PTAs, I reveal patterned inequities across hidden funds at public schools and I surface portable lessons in terms of policy and advocacy efforts that can lessen the inequitable influence of these impactful supplemental resources.

This presentation is part of an on-campus interview for the Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Equity<https://careers.uoregon.edu/en-us/job/534178/assistant-professor-of-education-policy-and-equity> position in the department of Education Studies.



About Claire Mackevicius

Claire L. Mackevicius is a postdoctoral fellow whose mixed methods research builds toward more just educational futures. Dr. Mackevicius considers the causes and consequences of how public and private entities decide when, where, and how to spend their power and resources.


Zoom Information

Zoom link<https://uoempl.zoom.us/j/82764894862?pwd=NVxf5lfBmt9qbQv4FiIEKn4gTUYH8B.1>

Meeting ID: 827 6489 4862

Passcode: 184950



For those unable to attend, the colloquium will be recorded, and a link shared after the presentation.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.uoregon.edu/pipermail/coe-staff/attachments/20241122/e8b438b4/attachment.html>