6 Dec 2007, Carol Merz Frankel
[This is an abstract of a paper given at the symposium School Board Research: Main Lines of Inquiry, in Des Moines, Iowa, September 14-15, 2007. The full paper is published in Relevancy and Revelation: The Future of School Board Governance, by Rowman and Littlefield, Spring 2008.]
Research on school boards over the years has demonstrated again and again the close connection between communities and their schools. The tension between local control and centralization has been obvious as costs rise and centralized efficiencies become available, yet local communities always seem to want to have a say in the nature of their schools. When we look at the effects of state-wide funding for schools, the result of court actions in most of the states in the past forty years, we see yet another area in which local control manifests itself, and another set of challenges that will present itself to the education community. In this chapter we will look at the effects of local fund-raising to supplement taxes. We will consider the possibility that state-wide funding of schools decreases the total amount available within a state, and whether we will be able to live with our goals for equitable funds for schools.
For about 30 years school districts around the country have been forming foundations to raise and receive donations from parents. At first these seemed to be extensions of traditional fundraising by PTA’s and booster clubs, but now that there are now hundreds of such foundations in the U.S. and millions of dollars are raised, they seem to have taken on a very different character from previous school fund-raising vehicles (Winter, 2004; Lewis, 2003). No one really knows how many foundations exist or how much money they raise, but we do know that there are about 100 such foundations in the United States that each raises over $1million annually (Lampkin and Stern, 2003). Foundations pay for supplies, equipment, field trips, and curriculum initiatives, but some also fund some teachers’ salaries (Pohlig, 2002; National PTA, 2004). Questions are routinely asked about whether these foundations compromise equity in school districts, and whether the willingness of local citizens to lend financial support to schools will result in the state taking its responsibility less seriously.
In the 1990s, a financial situation occurred in California triggering this different kind of fundraising in affluent school districts. Examining this time gave a research team an opportunity to look at foundations in a new light. In this unique and somewhat narrow context we were able to address some of the questions raised about foundations. In addition to looking at the question of equity, we looked at the relationship of state and local funding of schools. In fact, we were able to consider the possibility suggested by Fischel (2000) that contributions to these foundations may be functioning as a voluntary tax similar to traditional local property taxes, which had been severely limited in earlier school equity efforts.