Is Free and Reduced-Price Lunch a Valid Measure of Educational Disadvantage?
By T. Domina, Nikolas Pharris-Ciurej, Andrew M. Penner, Emily K. Penner, Quentin Brummet, Sonya R Porter, Tanya Sanabria. Educational Research, 2018
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Students in the United States whose household income is less than 130% of the poverty line qualify for free lunch, and students whose household income is between 130% and 185% of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunch. Education researchers and policymakers often use free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) status to measure socioeconomic disadvantage. But how valid is this measure? Linking IRS income tax data to school administrative records for all eighth graders in one California public school district and Oregon public schools, we examine how well FRPL enrollment captures student disadvantage. We find that FRPL categories capture relatively little variation in household income. However, FRPL captures elements of educational disadvantage that IRS-reported household income data do not.
Subfields: Education, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac707a7c1019ac7b7e47b84c578f5927774afa45
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Citations in the corpus
- Seven strong claims about successful school leadership revisited (2020, background): “Clearly however, pupils’ cognitive, social and emotional growth is influenced quite substantially by other factors as well, including, for example, socio-economic factors (Domina et al. 2018), features of the home and relationships between the home and school (Jeynes 2011; Goodall 2018).”