Crowdsourcing educational projects is perhaps not what immediately comes to mind when one thinks of crowdfunding, but research from the University of Michigan highlights not only how popular it is but how effective it can be.
The research shows that even $400 invested via a platform like DonorsChoose can have a real impact, especially for lower-income students. Indeed, each funded educational project on the platform achieves up to a 1.6% increase in pupil performance.
“We find this effect is driven mostly by low-income schools, indicating funded projects help close the gap in educational outcomes between students at low- vs. high-income schools,” the researchers say.
Crowd support
The researchers analyzed the impact of projects on DonorsChoose on K-12 students in Pennsylvania, which is an area with high funding disparities between wealthy and poorer areas. The impact of the projects was assessed via test scores that were gathered from the Pennsylvania Department of Education for the 2012-13 and 2017-18 school years.
The team was initially surprised by just how little investment was required to make a significant difference, but this gradually made sense when they delved deeper.
“We are not surprised that when teachers have a well-formed idea for how to improve student learning that costs only $400 to implement, this idea will pay off big because of the frontline insights that teachers have into what their students need,” they say.
“$400 in supplies and materials given to district leaders or principals as part of a top-down policy intervention is not the same as $400 of supplies and materials given to a teacher who has specifically requested them to help students.”
Operations management
Operations management as a concept is one that has primarily come from manufacturing where it has long been accepted that frontline workers can make marginal improvements that add up to significant change across the system as a whole.
“Because frontline workers are closest to the process, they can see what obstacles and failures make systems ineffective or inefficient,” the authors say. “Teachers have small and low-cost ideas for how to remove obstacles and inefficiencies that inhibit student learning, and our study’s findings suggest that hearing these ideas is critical for improving student performance and reducing educational inequalities.”
DonorsChoose has fulfilled over 1.7 million such classroom requests since it was founded by a history teacher in 2000. The platform has been so popular that around 80% of schools in the United States have had at least one project posted on the site, which has collectively mobilized around 5 million individual donors who have collectively donated over $1 billion.
These requests commonly include technology, teaching supplies, books, and durable goods, such as printers. When teachers put together their requests, they select their desired items from a range of vendors that work with the platform.
“After analyzing over 20,000 teachers’ impact statements, we find for lower-income schools, projects that improve student knowledge retention through better focus and fewer distractions or make repeated and shared use of resources have the largest impact,” the researchers say. “In higher-income schools, teachers’ projects focusing on differentiating lessons across substudent groups have the highest impact.”
Fresh funds
Before platforms such as DonorsChoose, teachers would often fund such things out of their own pocket, which inevitably placed limits on the kind of things they could provide for their students.
“It probably is not a good idea to force teachers to crowdfund—it can be time consuming and forcing teachers to do it may dilute the quality of ideas,” the researchers explain.
Ultimately, more system-wide reforms are needed to ensure that teachers aren’t forced to look externally for funding to do what they desire with their pupils, but until such times, the results suggest that the platforms are certainly providing a good bang for their buck.
