Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data are used ubiquitously to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)—a recently-implemented policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program—allows schools serving low-income populations to identify all students as FRM-eligible regardless of individual circumstances. We study the CEP’s effect on FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage, and relatedly, we examine the viability of direct certification (DC) status as an alternative disadvantage measure. Our analysis is based on administrative data from Missouri.

We assess the CEP-induced change in the informational value of FRM data in terms of the ability of FRM data to predict key student outcomes—test scores and attendance. This approach builds on recent work by Domina et al. (2018) and Michelmore and Dynarski (2017) and is motivated by a measurement error framework in which the CEP can be viewed as increasing measurement error in the FRM-eligibility indicator. In order to separate the effect of the CEP from other factors, we rely on “pseudo-coded” scenarios in which we falsely code schools as CEP adopters prior to policy implementation. In our initial pseudo-coded scenario, we begin by identifying all Missouri schools that adopted the CEP in the first year it was available. We then go back in time and pseudo-code these schools as CEP adopters prior to the policy and estimate our models using the pre-CEP, pseudo-coded data. By comparing the results to results from models that use the actual pre-CEP data and FRM coding, we can assess how CEP-induced changes to which students are coded as FRM-eligible affect the informational content of FRM eligibility, holding all else constant. We expand on this basic idea to include schools that adopted the CEP within the first three years of its availability, then obtain an upper bound effect of the CEP by pseudo-coding all CEP-eligible schools in Missouri as adopters regardless of their future adoption decisions.

Our findings on whether the CEP degrades the informational content of FRM data are mixed. At the individual level there is essentially no effect, but the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the FRM-eligible share of students in a school. Our comparison of FRM and DC data in the post-CEP era shows that these measures are similarly informative as proxies for disadvantage, despite the CEP-induced information loss in FRM data. Using both measures together can improve the identification of disadvantaged students, but only marginally.