As we reviewed the numbers from state-supplied school finance data, we would notice sudden "peaks" of exceptional success in securing funds, and these would become the subject of some of our telephone interviews. What we usually found was that a school or district had enjoyed a large infusion from an exceptional source -- an anomaly in the usual patterns of giving and receiving. As often as not, these anomalies came with a larger story than just success in obtaining funds, and those stories revealed a pattern of unexamined, unintended consequences. For example, large infusions of funds from national foundations are relatively rare and can have disrupting effects on local giving. The Houston Annenberg Challenge, a $20 million grant to six school districts in the Houston area, came as a one-for-two match challenge, and efforts to secure the additional $40 million in the greater Houston area have reportedly drained the well for others seeking support for worthy projects in and outside education.

We also noticed a number of indications that charter schools have the potential to cause shifts in local philanthropic funding streams. This is most visible in Texas, where 86 charter schools filed reports with the state education agency in 1998-99 detailing receipt of about 4 percent of the state's total reported gifts and grants to K-12 public education (86 charter schools is only 1.2 percent of the state's 7,090 public schools). Six of those 86 Texas charter schools were among the top 100 entities in gift and grant receipts in the state in 1998-99 (the others were districts). A conversation with the state education agency in Louisiana indicated that in East Baton Rouge, a charter school that received no donations in 1997-98, benefited from $270,100 in donations during the 1998-99 school year. Appropriately, such decisions come out of the philosophy of private donors, and it is obvious that some support charter schools as a way of putting competitive pressure on poor-performing traditional public schools. It is interesting to speculate, however, that traditional schools responding to this pressure could find themselves in a double bind of not being able to find the outside funding they need to initiate meaningful reforms.

The Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics (OSSM) is another example. The two-year school, created through legislation in 1983, is a residential public high school for academically gifted students. OSSM has its own foundation that has been successful in securing funding from most of the major independent foundations in the Oklahoma City area, as well as major corporations. One of the largest private foundations in Oklahoma has committed $150,000 toward a teaching laboratory at OSSM, with funds to be matched dollar-for-dollar by the state. By contrast, the foundation contributed just $1,000 to a local Partners in Education Foundation to provide grants to teachers, and $17,500 to the another district's Educational Endowment fund towards the cost of computer software. Is it the relative talents of proposal writers, the philosophy of the foundation, or some other factor that results in such disparities; are there implications, and for whom?