Here is an article I found by The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fu...

"PTA at a well-off school might raise a million dollars or more to pay for additional teachers’ salaries, band or orchestra instruments, a new library, iPads for classrooms, field trips, or other initiatives."

"I later learned that most of the shiny extras (and even some full-time aides and specialty subject teachers) at the other schools were funded by PTAs with budgets in the six and seven figures. Our school’s PTA had less than a thousand dollars in the bank."

Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC.

But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.

The Center For American Progress released a 2017 study[1] based on fiscal 2013-2014 data. The top 50 richest PTAs are listed in Appendix I.

[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/04/180...

Thanks! So for these top-50 schools, it comes out to about 10% extra budget. And there are about 100_000 public schools in the USA.

Yes. It exacerbates the inequality because most of the top-50 richest PTA schools can afford extras that boost student engagement or provide in-class assistance via teaching assistants thus lowering the student:teacher ratio.

When a PTA can afford to pay for extras that the school doesn't or can't (e.g. extra art & music teachers, computer labs, playground monitors, etc.), a student's quality of life at such public schools is generally objectively better compared to students at public schools without the extra budget. The year-over-year budget boosts are profound.

Yes this is true. But it doesn't seem that big to me: 10% extra budget isn't nothing, but it's at a few schools which are competing with private schools, which (I think) charge more like 2-3 times as much.

And this is the top fraction of 1% of public schools. The merely top-20% schools, nice suburbs far away from wall street, they raise a fraction of this. I don't think it can explain very much of what's different there compared to the bottom-20% schools across town.

That doesn’t say anything about a Uber style bake sale lose money on every order scheme. PTAs accept donations.

I agree with your overall premise, there was no need to make up a story around it.

This was hyperbole. I don't think I made anything up, I only exaggerated the concept of buying commercially produced muffins to be resold for 0 revenue to the purchaser.

A more grounded example of this behavior is well off parents buying their child's quota of items that are meant to be sold door to door out of a catalog to raise money. I don't know the name of this type of fundraising but this is a behavior I have witnessed many times. Parents buying overpriced crap out of a catalog so that their kid gets the extra credit and other perks offered by the school in exchange for this.