Plugging Holes or Hoarding More? Toward an Understanding of Fundraising PTA (Parent Teacher Association) Spending Dynamics at K–12 Public Schools

• In Event: Toward Understandings of Fundraising PTAs as Sites for Exclusion, Engagement, and (In)Equity

Abstract

Decades of policy efforts have aimed to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources across K-12 public schools, weakening the link between community wealth and government resources at schools (Chingos & Blagg, 2017). At the same time, fundraising PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), Organizations (PTOs), and “Friends of” groups) have grown dramatically in number and size (Nelson & Gazley, 2014). School funding research and policy do not systematically take fundraising PTAs into account–they represent an understudied source of these discretionary funds at public schools.
Existing studies investigating fundraising PTAs document that they are distributed inequitably along economic and racial student populations (e.g., Arsneault et al., 2021; Murray et al., 2019), and this scholarship typically implies that these organizations exist to plug government budget holes. However, there is not yet clear evidence that charts the dynamics and trajectories of spending by PTAs and which reveals what factors might influence their spending.
In this study, I apply a series of quasi-experimental techniques to disentangle the extent to which fundraising PTAs–in their capacity as sites for community engagement and in the ways they facilitate supplemental private funds at schools–operate in ways consistent with plugging government budget holes, facilitating community-building collectives, and/or reinforcing districts’ reputations for investing in public schools. I test three theory-driven predictions of what might influence PTA spending writ large, and highlight how differential responsiveness by relatively whiter and/or wealthier schools may be consistent with PTAs facilitating a “cycle of entrenchment” as racialized organizations (Ray, 2019).
I leverage referenda elections in California, which are a common pathway through which school districts can increase government spending at schools, to understand how different factors–the event of an election itself, the outcome of the election, and/or the election-induced change in government spending at schools–influence fundraising PTA spending. I analyze a panel dataset I created linking all fundraising PTAs to schools (and districts) in California from 2005-2018, and the 1335 school budget referenda held in that period to consider:
Does fundraising PTA spending change in response to changes in government resources at schools?
Does fundraising PTA responsiveness differ by schools' relative racial and economic statuses?
I account for multiple elections within districts during the study period, and use a matched stacked difference in differences approach to compare districts that had and did not have elections and delve deeper into impacts of the election outcomes using dynamic regression discontinuity (e.g., Baron, 2022; Cellini et al., 2016; Rauscher, 2020).
Preliminary results reveal a nuanced reality of fundraising PTA dynamics in that their spending is not consistent with any one of three theory-rooted predictions at the exclusion of the other(s): PTAs appear to some degree to plug government budget holes, facilitate community building, and reinforce an “investment in public schools” identity. This study represents the first causal evidence of several potential influences on fundraising PTA spending, which will help to inform pathways toward lessening the racial and economic inequities these organizations entrench.

Author

• Claire Mackevicius, University of Oregon