ERIC Number: ED595218
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2019-Jan
Pages: 63
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Using Free Meal and Direct Certification Data to Proxy for Student Disadvantage in the Era of the Community Eligibility Provision. Working Paper No. 214-0119-1
Koedel, Cory; Parsons, Eric
National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER)
Free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data are used ubiquitously to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)--a recently-implemented policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program--allows schools serving low-income populations to identify all students as FRM-eligible regardless of individual circumstances. We study the CEP's effect on FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage, and relatedly, we examine the viability of direct certification (DC) status as an alternative disadvantage measure. Our findings on whether the CEP degrades the informational content of FRM data are mixed. At the individual level there is essentially no effect, but the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the FRM-eligible share of students in a school. Our comparison of FRM and DC data in the post-CEP era shows that these measures are similarly informative as proxies for disadvantage, despite the CEP-induced information loss in FRM data. Using both measures together can improve the identification of disadvantaged students, but only marginally.
Descriptors: Low Income Students, Economically Disadvantaged, Eligibility, Lunch Programs, At Risk Students, Poverty, Elementary Secondary Education, Gender Differences, Racial Differences, Ethnicity, English Language Learners, Students with Disabilities, Academic Achievement, Student Characteristics, Institutional Characteristics, Accountability, Value Added Models
National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. American Institutes for Research, 1000 Thomas Jefferson Street NW, Washington, DC 20007. Tel: 202-403-5796; Fax: 202-403-6783; e-mail: info@caldercenter.org; Web site: https://caldercenter.org
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at American Institutes for Research
Identifiers - Location: Missouri
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A