IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/24986.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

School Nutrition and Student Discipline: Effects of Schoolwide Free Meals

Author

Listed:
  • Nora E. Gordon
  • Krista J. Ruffini

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Nora E. Gordon & Krista J. Ruffini, 2018. "School Nutrition and Student Discipline: Effects of Schoolwide Free Meals," NBER Working Papers 24986, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24986
    Note: CH ED
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24986.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chambers, Stephanie & Boydell, Nicola & Ford, Allison & Eadie, Douglas, 2020. "Learning from the implementation of Universal Free School Meals in Scotland using Normalisation Process Theory: Lessons for policymakers to engage multiple stakeholders," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    2. Marcus, Michelle & Yewell, Katherine G., 2022. "The Effect of Free School Meals on Household Food Purchases: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    3. Andres Cuadros‐Meñaca & Michael R. Thomsen & Rodolfo M. Nayga, 2023. "School breakfast and student behavior," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 105(1), pages 99-121, January.
    4. Cory Koedel & Eric Parsons, 2020. "The Effect of the Community Eligibility Provision on the Ability of Free and Reduced-Price Meal Data to Identify Disadvantaged Students," Working Papers 2005, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    5. Sofía Collante Zárate & Catherine Rodríguez & Fabio Sanchez, 2022. "El poder de un refrigerio. La alimentación escolar y sus efectos educativos en Colombia," Documentos CEDE 20223, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H52 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Education
    • I0 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24986. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.