Entrenching and Exclusive or Engaging and Equitable? Fundraising PTAs and School Spending Elections (Poster 40)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

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), which provide supplemental private resources at some public schools, have grown dramatically in number and size (Nelson & Gazley, 2014). Despite how much resources matter for student academic outcomes (Jackson & Mackevicius, 2024), school funding research and policy does not systematically account for the resources flowing from fundraising PTAs.

The extant literature on fundraising PTAs finds that their spending is inequitably distributed along economic and racial dimensions (e.g., Hill et al., 2021; Murray et al., 2019). However, there is not yet clear evidence that charts the dynamics and trajectories of spending by PTAs and how they relate to local school funding policy levers. In this study, I disentangle the relationship between fundraising PTAs and school funding elections.

I leverage referenda elections in California, which are a common pathway through which school districts can increase government spending at schools, to understand how school funding elections, outcomes of those elections, and/or election-induced changes in government spending at schools influence fundraising PTA spending. By considering heterogeneity across schools’ relative status within their district–by racial, economic, and other factors–my findings will provide clarity on how fundraising PTAs represent different forms of engagement and equity, and/or hierarchy entrenchment and exclusivity in access across contexts."

Author

• Claire Mackevicius, University of Oregon