PTA. Parent-Teachers Associations, is a national organizations and no school can use the term PTA unless they meet the standards set by the National PTA organization, one of which is INPUT FROM PARENTS.
PTO, Parent-Teachers organizations, are formed by schools that can not or do not (Most often the later) want parental input. As a rule these Schools perform much worse then Schools with PTAs.
The difference is how much the school TRIES to get parent's input. You can NOT force a parent to have input, but you can encourage it. i.e. not only sending to the parents the student's grade (Required in every state that I know of) but giving the teachers the support and time to contact any parent of any child that has a problem. Schools with PTOs tend NOT to do this, Schools with PTAs tend to make at least some effort at this.
30 years ago when I was in Collage, I ran across a book that gauged schools (Not as individual schools, but overall looking at what made good schools good and bad school bad). As a whole Public Schools were the best, Catholic Schools were just behind them, with other private schools way below those two. The main reason was parental input, the more parental input the better the schools. Thus Public Schools and Catholic Schools were one and two on the list.
The book then went into the different "Types" of public schools and warned parents to stay away from schools that bragged about their football team. Such schools tend to be quite large, to pull a lot of students to the school. The size of the School and the area it drew from tend to discourage parental input for the school was NOT the center of the Community but a school miles from any community. Such School have no center and thus turn to sports to "Unite" the student body. For this reason such schools tend to have PTOs. Thus all signs of a bad school.
This trend was seen in Rural Schools AND inner city schools. The power the be in such school districts wanted the best education for their children and by that they wanted top end classes (Calculus, Chemistry II and other higher end classes) for their Children. Such schools realized the only way to justify such classes is to get enough students in one location to have such a class, even if 95% of the student body did not need it. Such people managed to get these Collage prep Courses for their children even if it meant that lower educated parents found it impossible to go to that school for any meeting with teachers and that resulted in the school doing worse overall.
The "best" school where I grew up was Mt Lebanon School District, a suburb of Pittsburgh. It had one rule since about 1900 when the district first form, all students will walk to school, at least grade school. This required the township (independent of the School Board, through covering the same area) to install sidewalks in every sub division. Thus you have a post WWII suburb with sidewalks. Most post WWII suburbs were designed around the Automobile, thus it is rare to see sidewalks even in residential areas of such suburbs, but such sidewalks are required by law in Mt Lebanon to this day. The School board and the Township worked together to make sure all schools were local and it was safe for the children to get to the school. It also made it easy for the parents to get to the school after work. Everything worked together to produce an effective school system.
My point is to have an effective School System the parents MUST be involved, such involvement includes making it easy FOR THE PARENTS to get to the school AFTER their have finished work. Large Centralized systems generally can NOT do that UNLESS IT MAKES THE EFFORTS TO DO SO. Mt Lebanon has done so and has done so for almost 100 years (MT Lebanon started as a Trolley Suburb after 1905 and the first Streetcars reached Mt Lebanon, but came into its own starting in the 1920s as an Automobile Suburb).
I point out Mt Lebanon for it is a system that is working. Many urban schools are working IF THE STUDENT BODY IS FROM THE AREA AROUND THE SCHOOL, the problem is most student bodies are NOT. Some of this is do to efforts to integrate schools in the 1960s (in an attempt to "improve" schools, at the cost of NOT actually improving them) but most of it is the result of the elite wanting the best for their children even at the cost of education of most students (and using integration as an excuse to produce the mega schools where such advance subjects would have enough students to justify the cost of the advance classes).
I saw this in my own High School, the "Scholar" program, which I was in, had only two non-whites in it, but we had the ability to take Calculus, Chem II and other advance classes. The other classes were inferior and the teachers knew they did not have to do much for the school was to far away from many of the neighborhoods the children were from. This was made worse when a new high school was built, closer to my home, but the plan was for it to replace at least two almost all African American High Schools, while taking just part of the White Student body from my High School. It made it easier for my parents to go to the school to talk to the teachers, but harder for African American Students, who tend to be from poorer backgrounds with parents who did NOT own a car to get to the new high school.
Side Note: For people who may want to know, I Graduated from South Hills High School in 1977, it is located in the Mt Washington Section of Pittsburgh, my younger brother and sister went to Brashear High School which opened in 1976, to replace Fifth Avenue High School. Brashear was located one river, one steep hill, Mt Washington, then up another steep "Hill" from wher Fifth Avenue High school had been, in the middle of the Hill District of Pittsburgh. The Hill District was and is overwhelmingly African American, many of who relied on public transit. If you wanted parent input from people living in the Hill District, the worse place to put the School was two miles away up and over one hill and then up another.
Here is a Picture of the first hill one must get over:
Given that the Hill District would have a higher percentage of parents without access to an automobile, the location of Brashear made its almost impossible for such parents to get to the school. The nearest public transit was over a mile away from Brashear. This how can parents from the Hill District, who do NOT have access to an Automobile, interact with the teachers of their students when such parents have to walk at least a mile through a part of town their are unfamiliar with? Now it was disclaimed at the time (1976) that this was part of a plan to disrupt parental input, but it was also pointed out the disruption of parental input was NOT even considered when the change was made. I give it as an example of how a School District can SAY they want Parental input, and then does all it can to prevent it.
No parental input is the key to improve schools, but I am never surprised when I run across Schools that say they want Parental input, complain of NOT having any Parental input, but then when you look at the School actual EFFORTS, you see they do all they can to PREVENT such Parental input. Talk is cheap, action cost time and money and many school prefer talk to actually doing what is needed to get Parental input.
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