Who Chooses DonorsChoose? Submission and Funding Patterns on the Nation’s Largest Education Crowdfunding Platform

Abstract

Crowdfunding platforms direct millions of dollars annually to schools across the country, but the scholarly and policy communities have a limited understanding of their operations. In this paper we leverage data from DonorsChoose and the Common Core of Data to examine the characteristics of schools whose teachers do and do not submit projects to DonorsChoose, the subject areas and resource requests of these projects, and the characteristics of projects that achieve full funding. We find that teachers in schools serving disadvantaged student populations in the lowest-spending states are most likely to post projects on DonorsChoose. Despite accounting for a majority of submitted projects, math and reading projects are less likely to reach full funding than those in other subject areas.

Keywords

correlational analysis crowdfunding finance inequality race race/ethnicity school finance social stratification socioeconomic status

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