Talk:DonorsChoose

Eligible Requestors

Eligible Requestors section has a problem. The text in both the left and right columns is duplicated. 71.139.6.127 (talk) 22:53, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Donors Choose arguably "harms teaching communities"

This article was written by a New York City Math Teacher: Please Don't Remove It.

"Donors Choose doesn't allow NYC teachers who are critical of its projects to express concern over the projects chosen. It also doesn't allow teachers to report obvious fraud, such as faked test score procedures and pattern of misconduct in a school requesting money from DC."

The budget for a New York City Art School Teacher is averaged at $45, and the teacher themselves supplies the school from their own salary. As a result teaching arts has become a part time job in some schools, outsourced to unqualified professionals, math teachers, sociology teachers, and this has not stopped high salaried principals from earning their pensions. In fact, it has kept the expensive tenured teacher at ease as budget cuts continue. This is the sentiment in the NYC teaching community.

If the money for the arts didn't exist, it would come from the pockets of older teachers, or Principals, and Assistant Principals themselves, who earn more than $100,000. However, when you give to Donors Choose you arguably keep expensive staff in place. It doesn't contribute to the evolution of public school education- it traps it." - A Fired Math/Art Teacher Teaching Art.

Screen Shot Recorded — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wet Santa (talk • contribs) 01:17, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: article not moved. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 11:32, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

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DonorsChoose → DonorsChoose.org – DonorsChoose.org is the full, legal name of this organization. It should be referred to as such. A redshield (talk) 17:08, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

• oppose for now; a quick google news hits shows that most sources still call it DonorsChoose.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 17:46, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose. Sorry but no, we use the WP:COMMONNAME which according to Google News is DonorsChoose with 1060 [1] results to 224 [2]. Zarcadia (talk) 17:49, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi beat me to it! Zarcadia (talk) 17:50, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

External links modified

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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080324100229/http://www.comedycentral.com:80/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=164383 to http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=164383

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Inaccurate claims in the new "Controversy" section

Hello Wikipedians,

I'm writing in as a representative of DonorsChoose.org to request the removal of (or at minimum, an edit to) the new "controversy" section added on 12/26 by an unregistered user, as the suggested course of action on this page. Here are two reasons for our request:

1. The blurb on Wikipedia does not accurately represent the contents of the cited article. It says "Google's partnership with the fund led to criticism by donors and teachers in 2016." The article does not cite any criticism from donors, and the only criticism from teachers is a) unrelated to the contents of the article and the Google partnership, and b) cited from Reddit, not a verifiable source. The article also does not claim that "new additional fees and rules were introduced."

2. The article cited is full of factual errors, and the article’s author was unwilling to resolve these errors when given that information. Once we saw that article, we sent the author a list of corrections, as follows. He did not respond or update the article.

Basic classroom supplies are the most commonly funded requests on DonorsChoose.org. Teachers aren’t incentivized to request any type of resource or subject matter. As documented on our impact page, technology requests are the second most common projects on the site. The average project costs $644 and DonorsChoose.org recommends teachers keep their requests in the $600 to $800 range to help their chances of being funded. Of course, we believe teachers know best what their students need, which results in projects of a wide range of costs. Unlike traditional crowdfunding sites, DonorsChoose.org is a registered nonprofit that fulfills every project that gets funded – shipping materials and coordinating class trips and visitors. We also manage thank you notes sent from funded classrooms to their donors. Here’s a more robust explanation of the costs associated with each project. DonorsChoose.org has also received the highest ratings from authorities like Charity Navigator and Guidestar for our org’s transparency, accountability, and organizational efficiency. All of the projects that Google funded on DonorsChoose.org supported Chromebooks that do not have a revenue-sharing agreement with Google. Also, these first funded project requests were created prior to any announcement of Google’s plan. In total, their grant to DonorsChoose.org is $5M out of more than $100M this year. Google has supported DonorsChoose.org multiple times, including community-wide flash-funding and accessible education – neither of which focused on hardware.

Thank you for reading, and considering a change to this article, which we consider to be an unfair and inaccurate representation of our nonprofit’s work. I'm fairly new to Wikipedia, so please let me know if there are procedures I might have missed that would help clear this up.

- Stephen 67.245.12.99 (talk) 15:16, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Stephen. Since you are not making this request as a registered user, I cannot use our notifications system to alert you that I have opened a conversation. I have actually taken some time to consider and research this problem since I made my edits a month ago (not directly related to action you wish to have taken). Clearly, there are two sides to this. I am not going to editorialise and discuss either, because as an editor I cannot engage in my own investigation and come to a conclusion and then change this article. This is known as WP:Original Research. By the way, the editor who made the changes in late December is not unregistered (although you seem to be). They have an account with a user name since January 2016.

It appears that the only way I can answer this concern is with a 'disputed' tag on the article (which I have added now). Please read it. It invites a visit to this talk page where the differences in facts can be discussed. (Not opinions, arguments, differences in perception of the good or negative of your work). Any changes will require citations / reliable sources to cover what decision is made, if any. In fairness, (WP:NPOV)) both sides must be equally represented in the article. By adding the maintenance tag and replying to you I am closing this as having been answered for requested help. As it stands now, this is just a content dispute. Hence the tag. Content disputes belong on the article talk page. I now have this article on my watchlist, so I will be aware if further comments are added. Wishing you the best, Fylbecatulous talk 00:32, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello Fylbecatulous, thank you for taking the time to respond. I’ve now registered to continue this conversation.

There are two points mentioned in the “Controversy” section that do not appear anywhere in the cited source material, and so should be removed:

1. The cited article does not mention “new additional fees and rules” that were put in place for this partnership. In addition to not being cited, it’s not true.

2. The cited article does not include any mention of “criticism by donors and teachers” related to the Google partnership. The comments from Reddit predate the partnership, making the statement that Google’s partnership “led to criticism…” inaccurate.

We’d welcome the chance to discuss this with editors, as not only was the original Register article inaccurate and unbalanced, the section on Wikipedia makes claims that are not supported by the cited article.

Stephen donorschoose (talk) 14:15, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

I killed this section as the source is bad, out of date and inaccurate. There are far better sources for criticism.

• https://speechisbeautiful.com/2015/06/6-reasons-why-i-stopped-using-donors-choose-and-what-im-doing-instead/ https://www.mic.com/articles/54021/want-to-keep-school-funding-alive-put-an-end-to-donorschoose (blogs from identifiable teachers backed up by other sources)
• https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/03/donors_choose_district_ban.html
• https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/29/18286095/donors-choose-crowdfunding-ban-school-districts
• https://go.edsurge.com/rs/590-LFO-179/images/2019_04_03_Crowdfunding_in_K-12_Report.pdf

Reboot (talk) 18:46, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Disputed tag should be on one section, not the whole article

I made some updates to the "Criticism" section last night to clarify the points that article is making, and realized that the "disputed" tag at the top is only referring to that one section, not the whole article. Any issue if I change it to a "disputed-section" tag instead? absolute_lithops (talk) 11:52, 22 March 2018 (UTC)