Equitably funding education in America means providing more resources to students who need additional support. Youngsters from economically-disadvantaged families are typically among those determined to need additional help, and have traditionally been identified by asking families to self-report their financial status and having a third party then verify their eligibility for services such as free or reduced-price lunch. But is direct certification really the right method for identifying family need? It has been criticized for being intrusive to families and burdensome to schools, but other methods regularly generate concerns in regard to their accuracy. New research out of Oregon compares various methods for identifying students in need, looking for the most accurate.
A group of researchers led by Stanford University’s Michelle Spiegel uses student-level administrative records from a sample of 1,060 public schools in the Beaver State from 2009–10 through 2016–17. These records are linked with U.S. Census Bureau data, Oregon Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program enrollment, and IRS data to construct two novel benchmark measures of student economic disadvantage—one based solely on IRS data, the other based on a combination of SNAP/IRS information. The researchers’ constructed measures are then aggregated to the school-by-year level to aid comparison over time and across schools versus five other measures actively used to report poverty levels in Oregon schools. These include student-specific measures, like free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL) and SNAP eligibility (without the addition of IRS data), and community-centric measures, like the Urban Institute’s Model Estimates of Poverty in Schools (MEPS) and the Census Bureau’s household income-to-poverty ratio.
Each measure includes various income cutoff levels, and thus they predictably yield different percentages of students defined as economically disadvantaged. However, the trend lines over successive school years do tend to correlate reasonably well. In other words, if one measure indicates an improvement in economic circumstances (fewer disadvantaged students) from year to year, most of the others indicate similarly.
There is, however, one exception: the Oregon Department of Education’s Economic Disadvantage rate, a widely-used measure which includes schools that take advantage of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allowing them to designate all students as economically disadvantaged. That measure showed the least correlation with the others and typically overestimated the number of economically-disadvantaged students, and indicated a relatively-stable percentage of economically disadvantaged students from year to year without reflecting the economic changes clearly shown in all the others. More on the implications of that in a moment.
Further comparison of trend data indicates that SNAP-based direct certification measures correlate most directly with the researchers’ own method, whose IRS-sourced data are not readily available to school leaders and policymakers. Thus, SNAP-based direct certification is likely the best and most accurate existing means by which to determine true economic disadvantage rates in schools, both over time and across schools.
CEP, which launched in the 2014–15 school year, likely achieved its aims of expanding access to nutritious food, reducing paperwork, and eliminating school lunch debt. But it also began skewing the Oregon poverty data almost immediately. The same pattern was seen by Fordham’s own analysis in our home state of Ohio, which went on to show that levels of other aid for economically disadvantaged students were likely impacted by the designation of 100 percent of students in a growing number of districts as eligible for free lunches.
Spiegel and her team don’t go that far in their analysis, but the implications of their findings are the same: To the extent that other financial supports for low-income students are allotted on a per pupil basis, it is inevitable that a poverty measure that includes all students without regard to actual need will sweep in families of far higher means, risking a misdirection of finite funding. In short, although community eligibility is a commendable school meals initiative, mounting evidence shows that its impact on school poverty measures has negative implications for equitable education funding writ large.
SOURCE: Michelle Spiegel et al., “Measuring School Economic Disadvantage,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (January 2024).
