A new study has found that nonprofits organized by parents and community leaders raised about $880 million for public schools and school districts in 2010, up from $197 million in 1995, with organizations in wealthier areas raising a disproportionate share of the total, the New York Times reports.

Published in the journal Education Finance and Policy, the report, The Rise of School-Supporting Nonprofits (39 pages, PDF), examined tax filings by parent-teacher associations, booster clubs, and foundations that raised at least $25,000 annually and found that between 1995 and 2010, the number of such groups nationwide more than tripled, to 11,500, while the dollars they generated more than quadrupled. The report also found that communities with higher median incomes were more likely to have such groups and to raise more money per student than less affluent neighborhoods. For example, groups in Coronado, California, raised more than $1,500 per student in 2010, while those in the San Diego Unified School District — where the median household income is roughly two-thirds that of Coronado — raised $19.57 per student.

Now that most states have funding formulas that either cap or redirect local property tax revenues in an effort to equalize public funding between affluent and poor districts, parents are looking at alternative vehicles as a workaround to such limits, Ashlyn Aiko Nelson, the report's co-author and an associate professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Times. "They are just becoming more sophisticated about creating innovative vehicles that they can use to finance public education at the desired levels."

"We are asking schools to do more and more, and we're not necessarily giving them funding to do it," said Kevin G. Welner, a professor of education at the University of Colorado. "The capacity of a school to provide truly enriching opportunities becomes more and more dependent on whether you can raise this extra money." Indeed, the inequities in local fundraising, which is unregulated and tax-deductible for donors, mirror the growth in wealth among the richest 1 percent overall, said Rob Reich, an associate professor of political philosophy at Stanford University. The energy that parents spend raising money for their children's schools, he added, "comes at the potential expense of their political engagement on a broader basis to actually get public dollars to be enough for all kids."

David Figlio, an economist and professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, argues that such fundraising is what keeps many wealthier parents committed to public schools. "If all of a sudden these super-rich people no longer can achieve what they want through the public sector," Figlio said, "they’ll just send their kids to private schools and take their ball and go home."