The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy…

Objective/Research Question: Community college "Promise" programs have proliferated recently, particularly in areas with many low-income, academically struggling students. Many Promise programs restrict eligibility by high school performance but set eligibility thresholds quite low. As such they function as "low-bar" merit…

Researchers examined the relationship between superintendent longevity and district variables on standardized test scores for students in North Carolina. The authors used hierarchical multiple regression to understand if superintendent-specific variables explained variance in student performance over and above district-based variables documented…

Accurately measuring the family incomes of students is essential to allocating school resources that meet the educational needs of all students, particularly the needs of students from low-income families. With the onset of the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, the need to accurately assess the financial condition of families who are suffering…

State law (Revised Code of Washington [RCW] 28A.235.290) requires the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to report annually to the Legislature on the number of schools participating in United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). The report must identify barriers to participation and…

Research for Action's "Educational Opportunity Dashboard" is an interactive on-line tool to synthesize data and rank all 50 states by how well they provide students access to schools that offer 14 indicators of educational opportunity from the federal Civil Rights Data Collection. On the Dashboard the indicators are compiled into an…

There are racial and ethnic disparities in use of out-of-school suspensions within the United States. The present study assessed for the presence of disproportionate suspension by race, special education status, and receipt of free or reduced cost meals using two separate metrics (risk ratios and raw differential representation); evaluated…

This report responds to the requirement of PL 110-246 to assess the effectiveness of state and local efforts to directly certify children for free school meals. Direct certification is a process conducted by the states and by local educational agencies (LEAs) to certify eligible children for free meals without the need for household applications.…

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…

The child nutrition programs support meals and snacks served to children in schools, child care, summer programs, and other institutional settings in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories. This report starts with an overview of child nutrition programs' funding structure and then provides detail on each program,…

A common rationale for providing free lunch for all students is that selectively receiving a free meal at school generates stigma. This study examines the hypothesis that eligibility to receive a school free lunch has negative effects on student educational outcomes, and that this stigma-effect is more severe in schools where a low proportion of…

Research emerging from the USA suggests that holding an incremental theory of intelligence (growth mindset) has a positive impact on academic success. However, limited empirical work has explored this relationship in a UK sample, and there has been a lack of research into the antecedents which might influence the development of certain…

Background: This study examines the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic on academic and career concerns of high school students; relationship between attendance and grades with educational concerns; and association between student perception of the pandemic and decision to attend school virtually or in-person. Methods: Diverse students in grades…

The primary source of federal aid to elementary and secondary education is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)--particularly its Title I-A program, which authorizes federal aid for the education of disadvantaged students. The ESEA was initially enacted in 1965 (P.L. 89- 10) "to strengthen and improve educational quality and…

There is a large and long-standing gap in education outcomes between pupils from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers in England (EEF, 2018; Hutchinson et al., 2020). Although there is some evidence of improvement since 2011, the gap has widened recently, largely as a result of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic…