High-poverty schools are less likely than low-poverty schools to have their crowdfunding campaigns fully funded, according to a new study from Grantmakers for Education. But it wasn’t always this way.
The study examined crowdfunding campaigns on the website DonorsChoose.org between 2009 and 2019. In 2009, 70 percent of such campaigns at high-poverty schools were eventually fully funded, while 58 percent of campaigns at low-poverty schools received full funding.
That gap narrowed, and since 2016, low-poverty schools have had more success fully funding their campaigns on the site than their high-poverty counterparts. In 2019, only 64 percent of DonorsChoose campaigns for high-poverty schools were funded, compared with 68 percent of low-poverty schools.
“For teachers in high-poverty schools, crowdfunding for the basic resources students need is becoming a way of life,” reads the report. “Requests are not evenly distributed, demonstrating how state funding formulas still fail to adequately account for the additional costs of educating the students who start with disadvantages.”
Crowdfunding campaigns at high-poverty schools are by far the most common primary-education campaigns on the site, so most of the money donated to schools ends up in high-poverty classrooms. More than 83 percent of school-related crowdfunding campaigns on DonorsChoose were for schools where at least 45 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch meals, and 58 percent of such campaigns benefited schools in the highest-poverty bracket, with at least 65 percent of students receiving free or reduced-price meals.
‘Warmth, Care, and Hunger’
By far the most-common requests for school fundraising are for literacy and language resources at 40 percent, followed by math and science at 27.7 percent, according to the report’s analysis of 1.8 million school crowdfunding requests.
The fastest-growing class of requests, however, focus on nonacademic resources, such as funding for issues related to warmth, care, and hunger. That category has grown by 187 percent since it was introduced as an option on DonorsChoose in 2016.
There also has been an explosion in the number of requests that mention “equity” or “social justice.” In 2009, there were only 208 such requests. In 2019, that had grown to 2,461 requests.
Projects in the category of “warmth, care, and hunger” are much more likely to be funded than any other category. According to the report, more than 80 percent of such projects are fully funded. This category of funding request is also nearly 3.5 times more common at high-poverty schools.
Meanwhile, campaigns seeking resources for foreign-language programs are 2.6 times more common at low-poverty schools.
