PTA Contributions and School Funding Inequities

• In Event: Inequitable Resources, Inequitable Access: Examining the Racialized U.S. Caste System Within Schools

Abstract

Introduction and Theoretical Framework
Parent fundraising in affluent white communities provides additional educational opportunities for relatively advantaged students, particularly in school districts with high levels of local education funding (Nelson & Gazley, 2014). Compensatory mechanisms that use federal and local dollars to level the playing field for poor and minority students result in wide variation in vertical equity across states. In North Carolina, poor students attend school in districts that receive about $250 more per-pupil than nonpoor students (Chingos & Blagg, 2017). However, these progressive funding benefits for poor students may be offset by charitable funding organizations, such as parent-teacher associations (PTAs), that can contribute up to $400 per pupil in a single school (Murray & Carter, 2020). This paper investigates:

To what extent do school-level per-pupil funding associate with per-pupil voluntary contributions to schools? Does racial or socioeconomic segregation within the district strengthen this relationship?

To what extent do voluntary contributions offset progressive funding allocations to schools?

In this paper, I use social reproduction and school finance lenses to examine the distributional implications of parent voluntary contributions on government efforts to progressively allocate funding to low-income and minority students. I hypothesize that parent fundraising is most likely to increase when school spending is low, but also in districts that have little socioeconomic or racial diversity. Also in this more critical tradition, I hypothesize that voluntary contributions from parents neutralize government attempts to equitize funding in the state.

Data and Methods
I draw on novel sources of secondary data to answer these questions: school-level spending matched with school-level PTA revenue. I built a 15-year panel of PTA revenues linked to NC elementary school-level administrative data. I incorporate 2017 measures of NC school spending from Edunomics Lab as well as demographic and financial covariate data from the National Center for Educational Statistics’ Common Core of Data. I construct dissimilarity indices to measure racial and economic segregation; per-pupil expenditures from state and local sources; school characteristics such as student-teacher ratios; and broader community/school district characteristics.

I use bivariate analyses to determine how distributional progressivity measures of school-level funding change when combined with voluntary contributions. I construct two measures of school-level progressivity that capture average differences in both 1) public funding per-pupil and 2) public funding combined with charitable funding per pupil weighted by the number of poor and non-poor students as well as the number of white and non-white students in a school (Chingos & Blagg, 2017).

Results and Significance
These analyses provide a depiction of how charitable funding matters for the equitable distribution of school resources down to the school level. Preliminary results suggest that there is no significant relationship between school funding levels and PTA revenues; however, levels of segregation independently predict PTA revenues suggesting an important line of inquiry about closure among advantaged parents. This analysis contributes to our understanding of educational practices that undermine school finance equity and illuminates the role of advantaged families in hoarding educational resources.

Author

• Brittany C. Murray, Davidson College