State law requires the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to annually report to the Legislature the number of schools participating in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). The report must identify barriers to participation and make recommendations to increase participation. The CEP…

Faced with the problem of how to measure the magnitude of economic disadvantage in the populations served by schools or districts, researchers addressing school finance topics have invariably turned to the fraction of students eligible for free- or reduced-lunches (FRPL). But the facile dependence on FRPL may be problematic. A large and growing…

Robust indicators are important for identifying disadvantaged pupils in education, and for ensuring that they are rightly receiving relevant state-funded assistance. This paper compares the quality and completeness of data from England on student eligibility for free school meals (FSM) based on an administrative census, with more all-encompassing…

Among the 50 states, 44 use free and reduced-price lunch enrollment to identify low-income students. These data are also commonly used to allocate federal, state, and local funding to schools serving low-income children. School and district poverty rates, as determined by free and reduced-price lunch enrollment, additionally feature prominently in…

Colorado's Healthy School Meals for All (HSMA) program provides free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of economic background, and aims to strengthen farm-to-school systems and school food service workers' pay. After unexpected increases in student participation, the program faced a significant budget shortfall that raised warning…

In September 2022, the Institute for Fiscal Studies' Deaton Review drew attention to clear evidence that the UK compulsory education system is failing to tackle inequality. Their analysis demonstrated that attainment gaps between pupils who are eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) and those who are not exist across all stages of education.…

The purpose of this quantitative, correlational-predictive study was to assess if and to what extent second-grade student race (operationalized as minority status) and student socioeconomic status (operationalized as eligibility for Free and Reduced Lunch) predict second-grade student classification as gifted under two scenarios: using the current…

Purpose/Objective: To describe the perceived benefits and barriers to move beyond Community Eligibility Provisions (CEP) and initiating Universal Free Meals (UFM) in all districts across the U.S. that choose to participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP). Methods: Cross-sectional survey conducted in…

We study the private market response to the National School Lunch Program, documenting economically meaningful spillovers to non-recipients. We focus on the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), an expansion of the lunch program under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Under the CEP, participating schools offer free lunch to all students. We…

The share of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) via meal applications is often used as a proxy for the share of students from low-income households at a school. But the recent adoption of universal meal programs, such as the Community Eligibility Provision, make it more difficult to consistently measure student poverty…

Most researchers and policymakers rely on the share of students eligible for free and reduced-price meals when describing student socioeconomic background in schools. But shares of students receiving free and reduced-price meals, and other measures related to the distribution of school meals, vary by state and across time because of changes in…

We estimate the effect of universal free school meal access through the Community Eligibility Program (CEP) on child body mass index (BMI). Through the CEP, schools with high percentages of students qualified for free or reduced-priced meals can offer free breakfast and lunch to all students. With administrative data from a large school district…

On July 23, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed a new rule that will restrict eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. On its own, the proposal will cut access to food assistance for about 3.1 million low income Americans, which will have significant consequences for individuals and families struggling…

Free and reduced-price meal eligibility (FRM) is commonly used in education research and policy applications as an indicator of student poverty. However, using multiple data sources external to the school system, we show that FRM status is a poor proxy for poverty, with eligibility rates far exceeding what would be expected based on stated income…

This paper presents an analysis of the extent to which poor pupils in England are clustered in schools with others like them. It is based on a segregation index of pupils eligible for free school meals for every year for which official national data is available. The trend over time has been published before up to 2019, and this paper extends the…