The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy…

A recent report commissioned by the Office of the District of Columbia Auditor examined the accuracy of enrollment projections by the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and by charter local educational agencies (LEAs). While the report found that enrollment projections were fairly consistent with LEA level enrollment, based on a sum of…

When lotteries are infeasible, researchers must rely on observational methods to estimate charter effectiveness at raising student test scores. Considerable attention has been paid to observational studies by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which have analyzed charter performance in 27 states. However, the…

Background: Limited data indicate that obese children are absent from school more than their normal-weight peers. We analyzed administrative data from a large urban school district to investigate the association of obesity and student sociodemographic characteristics with absenteeism. Methods: We analyzed 291,040 records, representing 165,056…

By contrast with other education and school service programs, the school lunch is new. Like any other new program, time is required to work out in detail its proper placement in the school organization, its exact functions in relation to the total school program, and the characteristics which tend to make it a part of the educational program, yet…