Clearly, affluent communities have greater financial resources to support their schools. Parents there also have the time and social capital needed to organize elaborate fundraisers and fill out the lengthy legal paperwork required to establish these foundations. With these enormous resources, parents in affluent communities can raise far more money for their schools than parents in other locations.

This extreme fundraising prowess is seen in wealthy communities across the country. Some parents groups at elite public schools in New York City, for example, raise so much money that their schools have earned the nickname “public privates.” School foundations at places like Brooklyn Tech, raise millions to fund science equipment, guest lecturers, and scholarships for summer programs. An elementary school in a wealthy area of Chicago raised $400,000 in one night with an auction that included airfare to vacation homes (while another school in a less-affluent neighborhood raised only $8,000 for the entire year with bake sales and book fairs). The school foundation for Woodside, California, will hold an auction in May that includes six tickets, a makeover, and a limo to a Taylor Swift concert (valued at $3,700), a shopping spree at a jewelry store (valued at $15,000), and a week at a vacation home in the Hamptons (valued at $15,000).

However, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how much money parent groups and foundations funnel into U.S. public schools as a whole. Estimates range from $2 billion to $4 billion per year. In a 2014 study, the public-policy researchers Ashlyn Nelson and Beth Gazley from Indiana University found that the number of parent-led groups raising at least $25,000 annually jumped from 3,500 in 1995 to 11,500 in 2010. These groups collected about $880 million total in 2010. Not surprisingly, these successful groups were concentrated in wealthy communities.

In a 2013 New York Times op-ed, Rob Reich, a professor of political science and education at Stanford and the co-director of the university’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, critiqued the fundraising efforts of parents in wealthy communities. “Charity like this is not relief for the poor. It is, in fact, the opposite,” he wrote. “Private giving to public schools widens the gap between rich and poor. It exacerbates inequalities in financing. It is philanthropy in the service of conferring advantage on the already well-off.” In an interview, Reich told me that wealthy communities often collect millions of dollars not by selling cupcakes at bake sales but by holding auctions with items that include tickets to the Super Bowl. Their proceeds, he contended, purchase items for their school that go far beyond additional niceties, such as lights on the football field, and are connected to the core enrichment of the school district, including science labs, performing arts centers, technology, and additional personnel, ultimately giving these students even more of competitive edge over their peers in poorer neighborhoods.