Who Donates to Schools?

It is not just teachers dipping into their own pockets

There is a general social sense that schools are underfunded and need whatever additional money we can offer.

I’m convinced this is at least partially due to how badly people underestimate how much money schools have. In our most recent public opinion tracker survey, parents underestimated government spending on public schools by a factor of three.

It is both unclear and inconsistent how much of that money ends up in the classroom and true that teachers routinely spend their own money to purchase classroom supplies. GoFundMe and DonorsChoose are full of schools and teachers asking for support. When we asked teachers about out-of-pocket spending as part of a teacher survey in 2022, we found that 71% spent their own money on classroom supplies.

But other than teachers, who participates in school crowdfunding? What kinds of parents donate personal money to their child’s school, above taxes and tuition?

We set out to find this in our most recent parent survey. Altogether, we found that just under a third of parents (30%) have made charitable contributions related to K-12 schools in the last year. Of those who donated, most gave over $100 and a quarter gave over $500.

You can check out the full crosstabs for pretty much every demographic variable you could ask for, but here are some highlights from frequently requested categories.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, high-income parents are more likely to donate than lower-income families. Nearly half of families with annual household incomes over $100,000 have made K-12 charitable contributions, more than twice the share of families with incomes below $50,000 (18%).

Comparatively, there was less disparity among race/ethnicity groups. Hispanic parents (40%) were more likely to donate than white (31%) or Black parents (26%). Families with kids in special education programs were more likely to donate than parents without kids in such programs (35% and 29%, respectively).

Families in urban settings (38%) are likelier donors than families from other community types. Republicans donate slightly more often than Democrats (37% vs. 32%), but both donate more than Independents (25%).

The biggest surprise to me among the crosstabs was the immigrant group. Forty-two percent of immigrants have made charitable contributions related to K-12 education. We can detail this category further: second-generation immigrants (46%) are more likely to have donated than first-generation immigrants (33%).

After looking at this data, my main takeaway was that, no matter where you look, people are donating to schools. The fact that half of people with incomes over $100,000 have voluntarily given money to schools is much higher than I expected—and these donations are overwhelmingly to public schools or school districts, we found.

We don’t know what specific K-12 functions they donated toward, unfortunately. It’s tough to estimate the extent to which people are donating toward things central to instruction and learning, as opposed to things more tertiary to core education like out-of-state class trips. I’m making a bit of an assumption based on personal experience that the former is more prevalent than the latter.

And if that is indeed the case, I do find it fascinating how we have two conflicting cultures running simultaneously. Not to editorialize how people should spend their money, but on one hand we have every expectation that public schools should be well-funded and freely accessible. At the same time, it is very normal to donate personal money to those public schools, even for the historically well-funded schools that higher-income families are likelier to attend.

There’s lots more on this topic I didn’t cover here, but if you’re interested in this topic, please check out the survey report and its crosstabs.

This was originally published to our Substack.