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Accounting for Parent Money in a Public School

Since the 1990s, parent funding of American public schools has increased. Past research offers three explanations of this phenomenon: 1. the economic explanation maintaining that parents contribute in order to supplement lagging public investments in education; 2. the opportunity hoarding explanation arguing parents contribute to secure educational advantages for their children; and 3. the civic engagement and social capital explanation that sees parent fundraising as an element of parents’ democratic participation in schools. This article considers the efficacy of these explanations in the case of parent fundraising in a Manhattan elementary school I call PSX. Applied to data collected through ethnographic research among PSX parents, the existing explanations provide an incomplete understanding of parent fundraising because they focus on the intentions and motivations of parents. A normative-institutional perspective provides additional explanatory leverage. Educational policy and normative expectations link parental fundraising and school quality. The money supplied by parents is an easy-to-read measure of a good school, and, by association, good parents. Parents give and give more because that is what they are asked to do.