Parents Against Administration in Schools

Conflicting Educational Association Groups The article critiqued in this document was Lareau and Munoz's "You're not going to call the shots: Structural conflicts between the principal and the PTO at a suburban public elementary school." This article contained original qualitative research in which the authors utilized the interactions between a Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) and the principal of an elementary school to analyze the source of structural conflict between the two. Their research consisted of interviews and observations at the school.

Interview subjects included the principal, school board members, and parents involved in the PTO. The authors believed the source of conflict stemmed from the structure of the PTO and the principal. The authors' key points largely revolved around the thematic issues that emerged via their observation and interviews.

Specifically, the authors (2012) were able to denote that the sources of conflict seemed to come from different priorities between the PTO and the principal, the structure of the PTO itself (which was hierarchically flat, strictly volunteer, and had high incidences of turnovers), challenges of authority between the group and the individual principal (p. 214). Another key idea was that this school was comprised of predominantly affluent parents. The authors (2012) noted that there is a correlation between upper and middle class parents and conflicts with school employees (p. 215).

Personally it seems clear that despite the thematic issues identified by the authors in this article, part of the source of conflict came from a sense of entitlement and authority on the part of the parents. The majority of the parents in the PTO were extremely rich. Personally, I have seen a number of different situations in which there are sources of conflict between affluent people and authority figures -- whether they are involved with the local media or in a Little League team.

Thus, it certainly seems logical that the affluence and the sense of privilege of the parents could have influenced conflict. The second article critiqued in this assignment is Eren's "Uncovering the links between prospective teachers' personal responsibility, academic optimism, hope and emotions about teaching: a mediation analysis." The article postulates that there is a correlation between the emotions, sense of hope, academic optimism (AOP) and personal responsibility of those who are studying to become teachers and their ability to motivate students and produce efficacious results.

The article features original quantitative research in the form of scales that measure the variables outlined in the title of the essay. The data was analyzed with MANOVA, MANCOVA, correlation regression analyses and hierarchical regression analyses. The author's key points greatly pertain to the results of the study. Those results indicate that the emotions of a prospective teacher are significantly related to his or her sense of AOP, personal responsibility, and hope.

However, the most noteworthy finding from the study is that there is not parity between the sense of hope and the sense of AOP in terms of the feeling of responsibility for the learning process of students. There is a positive mediation between these factors and AOP. However, these same factors are "moderately and negatively mediated by hope" (Eren, 2014, p. 73). Optimism is supersedes hope in this regard. Personally, I think these results are highly significant and attest to the differences.