An Analysis of Schools That Operate Under National School Lunch Program Community Eligibility Provision

• In Event: 25.065 - Community Eligibility and National School Lunch Program Status: A View From NAEP

Abstract

This study used the NAEP 2015 mathematics data for grades 4 and 8 to take a closer look at students who are classified as NSLP eligible based either on individual eligibility (“non-CEP-ALL students”) or school wide eligibility for lunch where moreover no individual student eligibility information is available from school files (“CEP-ALL students”). There are other implementations of CEP (CEP-Direct Certification), where individual eligibility can still be determined even though all students receive free lunch. In those cases, students are coded according to their individual eligibility, not based on free lunch reception at school.
Grade 4 CEP-ALL students scored very similar to “regular” NSLP eligible students (where eligibility was determined individually), giving a first indication that it is unlikely that under CEP-ALL many high SES students have been mislabeled as “poor” (NSLP eligible).
One reason as to why the introduction of CEP may not have had the feared detrimental effect on NSLP as an SES proxy (yet) can also be seen from frequency tables of CEP-ALL school’s own evaluation of the percentage of NSLP eligible students at the school: Schools that that did not respond “100%” (one way to interpret the school questionnaire question for CEP-ALL schools), or did not provide information (missing), mostly responded that the school had between 76-99% NSLP eligible students. It appears then that it was mostly schools with a very high density of NSLP eligible students that were early adopters of CEP-ALL.
This short presentation provides additional context and a possible explanation for the findings in the previous presentation.

Authors

• Cheng Shuang (Grace) Ji, American Institutes for Research

• Markus Broer, American Institutes for Research