I spent my career working in higher education and securing external funding was a fact of life in this environment. Making the effort to write grant requests and occasionally secure a grant was a part of our merit pay process. As the pressure to find funding sources to support research and research-related infrastructure and to reduce student tuition has increased, expectations have increased. In some institutions, it is a requirement to secure a certain type of grant (translate as – a grant that provides lots of overhead which is money that goes to the institution to support institutional needs, in addition, to support for the researcher) to be granted tenure or perhaps to be promoted to full professor. The differences across disciplines in the amount of this type of money that is available makes this a very unfair practice, but this is a topic for a different discussion. Let be sufficient to just state that profs in higher ed are frequently expected to secure external support for their work.
What about K-12? While the pressure is far less, K12 administrators and educators may search for funding sources beyond those available through their schools. There are grants. Most of these grants target specific goals and depending on the needs that exist within a given school, the likelihood of being funded is heavily influenced by whether a school has the need the grant was designed to address. Most grants at this level are far less competitive than the grants in higher education, but someone must do the work to apply and there is no guarantee that funds will be available for all who might qualify. Larger districts often have an individual responsible for responding to this type of opportunity and it might be an administrative responsibility in smaller districts.
There is a second type of external funding that might be described as “crowdsourcing”. In higher education, the crowd being approached tends to be the alumni of the institution. In K12, it is likely to be community members and even others interested in supporting needs which they find important. The Internet provides an increasing number of ways in which such appeals might be launched. Again, my experience with crowdfunding has been in higher education and I know that any efforts we might want to make to solicit funds from our alumni required that we go through the alumni association. Our efforts had to first be cleared with university officials to assure that our requests were consistent with university priorities.
K12 educators have multiple online services that provide a way to solicit funds (this article from EdSurge offers an in-depth summary of this issue in K12). This article identifies issues related to crowdsourcing and the opportunities for educators. Many public K12 institutions are underfunded and crowdsourcing offers individual educators a way to secure additional resources for their classrooms. Whether or not requests made by individual teachers meet district priorities is an issue similar to what I have described in higher education. Individual differences in opportunities for learners created by such funds across classrooms is another issue. Are educators expected to secure funds to create needed circumstances in their own classrooms? From a broad view, do the successful crowdsourcing efforts of some teachers relief the public of their responsibility for public education.
