Schools Can't Accurately Measure Poor Students

Mei 01, 2016, at 8:00 a.m
By Lisette Partelow 
Source : www.usnews.com/

A student prepares the food she is offered under the National School Lunch Program in March 2011, at McAuliffe Elementary School in Chicago. Schools can no longer count on using the program to determine the number of poor students they enroll, new research shows. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images)

It's becoming more difficult for schools to accurately gauge the number of poor students they enroll – an important metric that's used for everything from doling out federal aid to tracking academic performance and measuring achievement gaps.

For decades, schools have defined low-income students as those who enroll in the National School Lunch Program, which provides free- and reduced-priced lunch to eligible kids – those whose families below 185 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $45,000 for a family of four.

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But that method "is quickly unravelling" and if left unchanged could have dire consequences for education policymakers and researchers warns a new report published Thursday by the Brookings Institution and written by Matthew Chingos, senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

"[Free- and reduced-priced lunch] participation data have long been put to research and policy uses for which they are ill-suited," Chingos says. "But FRL status is now headed toward its demise as a useful tool for research and policy."

Policymakers have long acknowledged that the proxy isn't perfect. But in more recent years, as the eligibility for the school lunch program has shifted in an effort to serve more students, the metric has become unreliable.

For starters, Chingos notes, the measurement only captures those who enroll in the school lunch program, and not those who are eligible for it. That means, for example, that two schools with similar student demographics could report dramatically different rates of poor students because one school might be more dogged in enrolling those who qualify. This has been a particular problem in high schools, where some students shirk their low-income status due to embarrassment or other factors.

Moreover, students who qualify for other public support programs, like food stamps, automatically qualify for the school lunch program regardless of where they fall on the federal poverty line.

Further complicating the accuracy of the metric, if 40 percent or more of students in a school qualify for other public support programs, the school is allowed under federal law to provide free lunch to all students in the entire school, negating the need for individual applications that identify accurate numbers.

The changes to the school lunch program have led to the number of students recorded as low-income consistently increasing, despite actual poverty measures falling and rising with the state of the economy, Chingos points out.

Recent data show substantially more kids are eligible for free- and reduced-priced lunch -- which is being used as a proxy for students living at 185 percent of the poverty line -- than there are kids who live in families below 200 percent of the poverty threshold.

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While increasing the number of students that have access to free lunch is a positive development, policymakers say, the thinned accuracy of the metric presents a big problem for education researchers – a large part of whose jobs include tracking the academic achievement of poor students to ensure they aren't falling further behind their wealthier peers.

Chingos estimates that because of the free- and reduced-priced lunch metric, up to two-thirds of schools are unable to accurately report student achievement for poor students.

"A failure to quickly identify and implement new measures of family background will render policymakers and researchers unable answer important questions and comply with federal education law," he says.

Notably, the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, maintains the federal requirement that states report student achievement data broken out by subgroups of students, including those who are low-income. Schools have traditionally used the number of students who qualify for free- and reduced-priced lunch as a way to measure this.

But with that metric becoming more and more diluted, Chingos says the Department of Education must release guidance for states and districts regarding new, more accurate measurements they could use. Those could potentially include, he offers, those who qualify for welfare, food stamps or Medicaid, or those enrolled in programs for homeless and foster youth.

"The core mission of the ESSA education law, like the No Child Left Behind Act before it, is at a minimum to shine a light on the academic performance of economically disadvantaged students," Chingos says. "These changes [to the school lunch program], they strike at the heart of that."