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Ken Hirsh

March 5, 2009

Charter School Statistics: Philanthropy

by , at 9:06 am

I have been compiling some New York City charter school data from tax filings.  “IRS Form 990″ is the required federal filing for tax-exempt organizations.  On these public documents, you can find information about fundraising and spending.  Since these forms are usually filed several months after the end of the reporting period, the most recent data I could find was for the 2006-2007 school year.  (I hope to get 2007-2008 data later this year.)

For the 39 schools for which I could get good data, the total amount of contributions received directly from individuals and foundations was $11,625,432.  These same schools served 9,898 students in that school year.  Therefore, the average per pupil philanthropic contribution was $1,175.

Several notes on this:
1. The 39 schools were taken from a list of 50 New York City charter schools in my database.  These 50 schools were chosen because they have taken state exams in 2007-2008. 

2. 11 schools were not included because either I couldn’t find the 990 form (8 cases) or the filing didn’t make sense to me (3 cases).

3. I think it is possible that some of these schools receive additional philanthropic funding through other entities.  I intend to do further research on this.

UPDATE: See the comments section for some more statistics and data.

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  • ceolaf

    Ken,

    Can you give us more than just the average? What was the median? What was thet top?

    Or, it being such a short list, can you just cut and paste it so we can see it?

    And last, are the ones you didn’t understand possibly more complicated because there were more gifts? What kind of thing made them so hard to understand?

  • Ken Hirsh

    Hey ceolaf,

    Great questions. In fact, I think they are important enough that I will probably answer them in a follow-up post or an UPDATE to the original post. Short answers:

    1. The median school is lower ($697), because there are a few very high numbers. The average school has a higher per pupil ($1,366) for the same reason.

    2. I think I can do that. Let me clean up the formatting a bit.

    3. For one of them, they showed no “direct public support” (the field that I think is correct and almost all charter schools seem to use), but they also seemed to put ALL inflows (including government funding) into a field called “Indirect Public Support”. If I had treated this school like the others, I would have averaged in a zero for philanthropy.

    For A second second school, they also had zero for direct public support, but they were the only school to use the “donor advised funds” column. If I had used either zero or this other number, it would have lowered the average. Since I wasn’t sure what they were trying to do, though, I didn’t include it.

    On the third school, they broke out the number between “direct public support” and “indirect public support”. They were the only school to populate the “indirect public support” field, which confused me, so I left it out. If I had inlcuded just direct, it would have decreased the totals slightly; if I included both, it would have increased the totals slightly.

    Overall, if I had included these three schools with my best guess, it would have lowered the average numbers.

  • ceolaf

    Ken,

    So, the median (the middle one) is about half of the mean (the normal average)?

    I would say, then, that that the mean is a poor way to describe the level of support support that these schools gets. You’ve got some outliers that are messing with the average.

    I think that, generally, we pay far too much attention to means, and not enough to medians. The mean is a theoretical thing, one that doesn’t really describe any school, whereas the median is the middle one, with half more and half less. When we talk about the average school, I think that we mean the one in the middle, as opposed to some theoretical one that is better than the middle because of a few outliers at the extreme.

    **************************

    More generally, I wonder what this does to the validity of our comparisons between charter schools and traditional schools? We don’t hear a lot about the distribution of performance across charter schools. Are they bunched together, here in NYC? Is it a bell curve? Are there more at one end or the other?

    One of the (few) great things about NCLB is that it pushed us to “disaggregate” data, to look beyond the overall mean/average.

    I wonder how often in research and reporting that the mean is used when the median would be more informative. I’m going to try to keep that in mind and point it out more often.

    -c

  • http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink

    ceolaf,

    You’re a terrific sparring partner. I know we’ve had our words but I see you are on a quest for truth. Keep it up and I look forward to future debates in this forum and possibly others.

    KS

  • Ken Hirsh

    ceolaf,

    I agree that the median is a better statistic for this data.

    Meanwhile, I can definitely put together some performance statistics on the charter schools in my database. Thanks for the idea!

  • Ken Hirsh

    Here are the “philanthropy per pupil” numbers for the 39 schools:

    $10,311
    $5,930
    $5,718
    $3,512
    $3,508
    $2,097
    $1,813
    $1,687
    $1,672
    $1,666
    $1,644
    $1,564
    $1,510
    $1,509
    $1,152
    $1,074
    $898
    $880
    $859
    $697
    $627
    $618
    $473
    $431
    $425
    $241
    $224
    $153
    $150
    $100
    $62
    $43
    $21
    $16
    $3
    $-
    $-
    $-
    $-

  • ceolaf

    Ken,

    To be clear, are those just monetary donations, or do they include in-kind donations?

    Does anyone know of any research into how well schools (charter or not) report in-kind donations? I know that I’ve gotten letters upon request from schools that I have made donations to, and obviously Donors Choose documents everything well. But on the school end, are they generally any good at keeping track of that? If there aren’t any consequences for underreporting — and I’ll bet that there are not — why would schools go through the trouble of properly keeping track of all of this?

    I’ve got to say, I find some of these numbers shockingly low. I mean, so low that I either would want to get some kind of audit or some training for the school administration and staff in how to get external resources to help their work. I mean, doesn’t a PTA bake-sale to buy books for the library count?

  • http://www.sfschools.org Caroline

    Even though I’m on the other coast, I’m interested in seeing which charter schools got which amount of philanthropy. Is there something I’m missing in not seeing the names on the list? Thanks.

  • Ken Hirsh

    Hey ceolaf,

    I believe that charter schools should be (and should have been) reporting in-kind donations. For details, read page 22 from the instructions at http://www.unclefed.com/IRS-Forms/2006/i990-ez.pdf. These are the instructions for the 990 form for the year in question. I believe the IRS introduced a new schedule (Schedule M) for better tracking of the different types of non-cash contributions. See http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/form990schedulem.pdf.

    I believe that organizations are subject to small penalties for failure to give correct and complete information. See http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=96103,00.html. I would think that fraudulent activities could result in much more severe penalties and would be governed by more general fraud statutes, but I haven’t researched this.

  • Ken Hirsh

    Hey Caroline,

    I left the names off for now. I might include them in the future. Of course, these numbers are all available on the Form 990s if you want to check out specific schools. I got the enrollment figures, by the way, from charter authorizer reports. Most completed 990s don’t include that information.

  • RIcky

    Please- can you tell me the top 4 schools you listed above which collected the highest donations?? This is important, and I dont have the resources to retrieve and analyze the 990. Thank you so much for your help and cooperation.

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