Public School Education Foundations : Advancing Opportunity, Excellence, and Innovation

This book offers an in-depth look at district-wide public school foundations, highlighting how they raise funds, operate, and drive impact to enhance educational programs beyond traditional public funding.

This book will be a collection of brief case studies on foundations that raise funds and provide support to public school systems to enhance their programs and impact. It will not include parent-teacher associations (PTAs) or parent-teacher organizations (PTOs), which typically raise funds for an individual school. Rather, the foundations studied will be those that support school districts. It will not focus on individual charter schools, although some district-wide foundations do support charters as well as traditional public schools. It will not include private foundations that make grants to public schools (e.g., Gates) but rather foundations created for the specific purpose of raising funds to supplement public funding of school systems. The focus will be on the operation and impact of the foundations, rather than philanthropy more generally.