The Effect of the Community Eligibility Provision on the Ability of Free and Reduced-Price Meal Data to Identify Disadvantaged Students

Cory Koedel and Eric Parsons ()

No 2005, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri

Abstract: 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 for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications, which is a common practice. We document empirically how the CEP has affected the value of FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage. At the individual student level, we show that there is essentially no effect of the CEP. However, the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the share of FRM-eligible students in a school. It is this latter measure that is most relevant for policy uses of FRM data.

Keywords: community eligibility provision; free and reduced-price lunch; student poverty; measuring student poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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