School Nutrition and Student Discipline: Effects of Schoolwide Free Meals / Nora E. Gordon, Krista J. Ruffini.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gordon, Nora E.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Ruffini, Krista J.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24986.

NBER working paper series no. w24986

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

School Nutrition and Student Discipline

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not qualify individually and potentially decreasing the stigma associated with free meals. We examine whether CEP affects disciplinary outcomes, focusing on the use of suspensions. We use school discipline measures from the Civil Rights Data Collection and rely on the timing of pilot implementation of CEP across states to assess how disciplinary infractions evolve within a school as it adopts CEP. We find modest reductions in suspension rates among elementary and middle but not high school students. While we are unable to observe how the expansion of free school meals affects the dietary intake of students in our national sample, we do observe that for younger students, these reductions are concentrated in areas with higher levels of estimated child food insecurity. Our findings suggest that the impact of school-based child nutrition services extends beyond the academic gains identified in some of the existing literature.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2018.