This study arose from a desire to better understand what kind of philanthropic support public schools are receiving and what they might expect from philanthropic sources, especially to support comprehensive reform approaches. Two secondary purposes were to assess whether SEDL might play a useful role (1) in assisting schools in the quest for philanthropic support and/or (2) in providing research-based information or other services to help donors in their decision making about contributions to school reform.

The following were our initial questions:

• How much support from philanthropic sources goes to public schools in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas?
• How is the giving distributed?
  • Who gets the money?
  • For what types of activities?
• Which are the most active grant makers and what are their characteristics?
• Is there a role for SEDL in providing research-based information or other services for philanthropic organizations?

We began by asking the state education agencies for data collected through various school finance reporting systems. This involved studying each state's reporting guidelines to learn what reporting codes are used for philanthropic revenues and then requesting the data for those codes. Each state has different codes and different definitions for the items reported under those codes (we eventually learned also that districts vary on how they interpret those definitions, and often err in their interpretations). The Arkansas Department of Education responded that the state has no reporting codes at all for philanthropic revenues.

To look at the philanthropic giving, we began with the kind of research one would do to locate a prospective funding source for a new project. Our primary sources were the Foundation Center's database, and the GuideStar database (Philanthropic Research, Inc.), supplemented with online searches of individual foundation and corporate Web sites. The Foundation Center's Web site also provided statistical data on philanthropy for the nation as a whole.

Finally, we talked with an informal sampling of state officials, local school staff, and philanthropy representatives to help clarify the data as we collected it. And clarification often resulted in more questions. For example, we noticed a huge amount of gift and grant revenue reported for a small Texas district where nothing like it had appeared before. When we called to ask what it represented we were told that it was actually part of an arrangement whereby a large corporation was recruited to the community with the incentive of a substantial property tax abatement (which withheld potential revenues from the district). In return, the corporation now makes a significant charitable contribution to the district each year. The donation, of course, is claimed as an income tax deduction. Texas Education Agency guidelines define gift and grant income as anything other than local tax and other local revenue, state funds, or federal entitlement funds, so this is reported the same as a foundation grant. Since the "gift" probably represents fewer dollars than would have been realized from tax revenues, one might question the actual value of such transactions, but we must wonder also how many "gifts" outside of normal philanthropy were in the numbers we didn't ask about and how much this compromises the picture we are trying to develop.

The Foundation Center provides consistent, but limited, data about philanthropic support for schools by massaging data gleaned from the giver's tax reports. The Foundation Center data, however, reflect a sample of grants, not an itemized account, as the law requires only minimal information. Further, the Foundation Center tracks the nation's largest 800 foundations, whereas we found that some of the most significant gifts to schools came from local foundations too small to make the Center's lists. And the Center's database does not distinguish between grants to private versus public schools, but we know from a visual scan that much foundation giving goes to private institutions. Obviously, a national database on wide-ranging philanthropic activity cannot accommodate the specific questions likely to be asked from every point of inquiry, so we cannot criticize; but we must acknowledge the difficulty of assembling a reliable, quantitative picture of philanthropy in support of education generally, much less public education or any level of detail beyond that.

The picture is further complicated by proliferation of local education foundations and other organizations that raise, manage, and distribute funds on behalf of schools and districts. Although revenue from gifts and grants is generally reported to the states in standard local school district financial reports, revenues from these indirect donor activities often are not. The apparent rise in the number of local education foundations and the dearth of information regarding revenue raised from these sources has been noted by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB, 1994), which has published a draft of a proposed statement requiring financial reporting by affiliated organizations.

One of the outcomes from this study, then, has been the discovery of how hard it is to capture a picture of our quarry. Simply put: the data are elusive, inconsistent, and ill-defined. Extant systems for capturing information in both the education and philanthropy sectors render imperfect data. Our clarification discussions with school and philanthropic officials have provided much useful anecdotal information, but much is still left to speculation. Perhaps we are pioneering a new area of inquiry, but in any case we are in a muddy field.

To move beyond this dilemma, we convened a review forum of representatives from private foundations, local education funds, school fund raisers, and philanthropy-focused associations. The group discussed a draft version of this report with the object of refining its observations and of expanding its utility, helping SEDL staff draft a set of suggestions for each of our target audiences.