A change to the free school lunch program will pose challenges for researchers who study educational outcomes and child poverty—and while I'm an ardent fan of good research in these topics, the cause is absolutely worth the challenges. The research challenge comes from a plan to
expand free lunch to every student at certain schools where at least 40 percent of students already qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
Free or reduced-price school lunches are, for too many kids, their most reliable hot, balanced meal and a needed bulwark against going hungry. They're also a convenient measure for poverty or near-poverty when studying education, so expanding free lunches to all kids at some schools will take away that measure. But not every kid who should get free lunch does: Some kids don't want the stigma of having their classmates see that they get free lunch, or their parents don't know to enroll them. Expanding free lunches to everyone at a school with more kids who are eligible will reach more kids who need that lunch.
Let's be clear: We need the kind of research that has long relied on school lunch eligibility to look at the effects of class on educational outcomes:
Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), for example, are broken out by eligibility for the school lunch program. In 2013, fourth-grade students eligible for the lunch program scored about 10 percent lower on average than their non-lunch-eligible peers in math and about 14 percent lower on average for reading.
But kids need food more. And researchers can figure out other measures—in fact, some think alternate measures are better anyway. Giving more kids the food they need is worth the effort.