Among the 50 states, 44 use free and reduced-price lunch enrollment to identify low-income students. These data are also commonly used to allocate federal, state, and local funding to schools serving low-income children. School and district poverty rates, as determined by free and reduced-price lunch enrollment, additionally feature prominently in…

Purpose/Objective: To describe the perceived benefits and barriers to move beyond Community Eligibility Provisions (CEP) and initiating Universal Free Meals (UFM) in all districts across the U.S. that choose to participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP). Methods: Cross-sectional survey conducted in…

This paper presents an analysis of the extent to which poor pupils in England are clustered in schools with others like them. It is based on a segregation index of pupils eligible for free school meals for every year for which official national data is available. The trend over time has been published before up to 2019, and this paper extends the…

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 allows school districts to provide free meals to all students if over 40 percent of them are directly certified as free-meal eligible. While emerging evidence documents positive effects on student behavior and academics, critics worry that CEP has unintended…

Understanding how school districts allocate resources across students and schools is important for designing efficacious and equitable school finance policies. Newly released school-level spending data allow for new insights about the level of spending a student experiences at her school and how well spending corresponds with student…

This report presents data on public elementary and secondary education revenues and expenditures at the local education agency (LEA) or school district level for fiscal year (FY) 2021. Specifically, this report includes the following types of school district finance data: (1) revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; (2)…

Approximately 20 percent of the public school students in the City of Los Angeles attend a charter school. Los Angeles is home to the second-largest school district in the nation. The School Choice Demonstration Project research team has documented disparities between traditional public school (TPS) and charter school funding in Los Angeles…

During the U.S. post-WWII recovery, appropriations for school lunch became codified in the 1946 National School Lunch Act, fueling program growth in the baby boom era to 18.9 million participating children by 1967, or about 42 percent of 45 million enrolled students. Then, in 1968, two reports funded by the Field Foundation of New York highlighted…

Internet connectivity has become a critical resource for teaching and learning. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is a prime example, with schools expected to implement online assessments and use online resources for instruction. Yet there is little known about the extent to which local education agencies (LEAs) and schools are taking…

The research objective is to explain evidence of structural racism, inequity, and inadequacy in the Michigan public school finance system related to the education of Black students or Black descendants of captive and enslaved Africans. This analysis stems from ongoing research that integrates transformative paradigms, critical race theory, and…

Whether someone has ever had free school meal (FSM) eligibility over a six-year period is the measure of socio-economic disadvantage currently used in the English school system. It is used to monitor the socio-economic gap in achievement in the education system, to identify particular children at risk of low achievement and to direct funding to…

The 2023 edition of the Annual Condition of Education Report (COE) marks the 34th edition of the report. For over 30 years, the Department has published the COE in order to provide education stakeholders critical data about the status of Iowa's education system. The 2023 COE includes a wide variety of content including information about Iowa's…

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…

The 2022 edition of the Annual Condition of Education Report (COE) marks the 33rd edition of the report. For over 30 years, the Department has published the COE in order to provide education stakeholders critical data about the status of Iowa's education system. The 2022 COE includes a wide variety of content including information about Iowa's…

This paper presents a description of the background characteristics and attainment profile of pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) in England, and of those missing a value for this variable. Free school meal eligibility is a measure of low parental income, widely used in social policy research as an individual indicator of potential…