Direct certification has been described by policymakers and academics as a tool which may replace National School Lunch Program (NSLP) eligibility data (Douglas Geverdt, National Center for Education Statistics, personal communication, August 28, 2023). It suggests a policy future in which we change the metric of how we identify disadvantage. On…

As the COVID-19 crisis disrupted schooling, recovery efforts in California included the adoption of Senate Bill (SB) 98, which mandated local educational agencies to complete Learning Continuity and Attendance Plans (LCPs). These plans act as critical snapshots of sensemaking and local policy implementation during crisis; however, their details…

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…

Colorado's Healthy School Meals for All (HSMA) program provides free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of economic background, and aims to strengthen farm-to-school systems and school food service workers' pay. After unexpected increases in student participation, the program faced a significant budget shortfall that raised warning…

Participating in advanced placement (AP) can improve high school students' cognitive and noncognitive outcomes. Despite nationwide efforts, including Arkansas's mandate for statewide AP access since 2003 and exam cost coverage since 2005, disparities in enrollment persist. Using multilevel modeling, we investigate the relation between…

Background: Despite the establishment of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) in 2010, child nutrition programs continue to experience challenges impacting participation. Prior qualitative studies have explored how to reduce barriers to implementation of these programs in schools, but few studies have examined attitudes held by students, who…

Background: Despite the establishment of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) in 2010, child nutrition programs continue to experience challenges impacting participation. Prior qualitative studies have explored how to reduce barriers to implementation of these programs in schools, but few studies have examined attitudes held by students, who…

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…

This article presents a case study on changing food practices from traditional cold sandwich meals to hot meals in a Norwegian kindergarten. Data were sourced from interviews, complemented by non-participatory video observation and observational notes. Building on Fullan's model for understanding a change process, this paper presents the…

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP) provide federal funding for school lunches and breakfasts served to nearly 30 million children daily in close to 94,000 schools. Because federal spending on NSLP and SBP depends in part on student participation in school meals, it may be of interest to Congress to…

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…

There is a large and long-standing gap in education outcomes between pupils from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers in England (EEF, 2018; Hutchinson et al., 2020). Although there is some evidence of improvement since 2011, the gap has widened recently, largely as a result of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic…

Elevate [Math] is a 19-day (76-hour) in-person summer math program created by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation to help middle school students who are struggling in math to achieve math proficiency, increase their interest in math, and develop a growth mindset. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the in-person summer program was adapted to a…

Urban public school districts in the U.S. vary in quality. Educational policies, distribution of resources, and the challenges that students bring to the classroom differ substantially across localities. Little surprise, then, that academic outcomes--such as high school graduation rates and average school performance on standardized…

Postschool outcomes of youth with intellectual disability (ID) continue to trouble practitioners and scholars. The purpose of this study was to analyze postschool engagement outcome data for 360 survey respondents with ID in South Carolina in the areas of employment and postsecondary education/training. Specifically, we examined the relationship…