Giving Compass' Take:

• Jill Barshay reports that fears that a change to the federal free lunch program that allowed whole schools to qualify would skew school poverty data were largely unfounded, according to research. 

• How can school poverty data be made more useful for political and philanthropic use? 

• Learn how expanding lunch programs could help reduce suspensions. 

In 2014, schools had a new way to give students free breakfast and lunch, paid for by Uncle Sam. Instead of asking low-income families to apply for the meals, a school district could opt to give everyone free food if at least 40 percent of the student population was already on other forms of public assistance or fell into a needy category, such as being homeless or in foster care.

There was some concern that school districts could mistakenly be reclassified as 100 percent low income overnight. New York City, for example, began offering its 1 million public school students free breakfast and lunch in 2017. More than 60 percent of the city’s students met the public assistance criteria but the children of relatively wealthy parents also attend public schools.  Some school buildings don’t have many poor kids in them.

Many sounded alarms that $16 billion a year in federal aid for low-income students could be misdirected to not-so-poor schools. School ratings and individual teacher evaluations across the country were supposedly at stake because of the poverty assumptions embedded in how much added value a school or teacher is providing. Even the most simple reading and math test scores might be corrupted, misleadingly showing improvements in the achievement of low-income kids.

But there hasn’t been much data analysis until now, when one Missouri study finds that the fears might be overblown and that our statistics on student poverty rates haven’t changed much.

“We don’t need to panic,” said Cory Koedel, a University of Missouri economist who presented his preliminary findings at a conference of the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) in January 2019. “If you liked the free-meal data five years ago, you probably shouldn’t start hating the free-meal data now.”

Specifically, Koedel looked at all the schools in Missouri that had adopted the community eligibility option during the first three years of the program, from 2014 to 2017, and found that it had the effect of raising the percentage of kids in the state who are getting free or reduced price lunch by only 2.3 percentage points — from 51.2 percent under the old system to 53.5 percent under the new system. Achievement gaps between rich and poor on tests were virtually unchanged.

Read the full article about school poverty stats by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.