Free and reduced-price lunch status has long been used as a proxy measure for student poverty. This brief offers a short history of school lunch and its recent decline as a measure of economic disadvantage. It then provides a primer on "direct certification," the most promising alternative, which links student enrollment with public benefits data to directly assess students' household income. Under direct certification, eligibility rules, application, and eligibility determination procedures of public benefits programs take on new importance in affecting counts of low-income students. Better understanding of direct certification can help stakeholders in education make sense of new measures of student poverty and use them in line with intended policy and research goals.