On a broader scale, education leaders should look beyond economic disadvantage to assess how public policy and other social conditions are disadvantaging students. Because direct certification also has limitations, the report also recommends:

Capturing different dimensions of disadvantage: Free lunch rates and direct certification are not designed to capture the barriers an individual student faces. Education leaders must also examine factors such as historic disinvestment and racial or economic segregation. Tax records or local poverty metrics can also provide more data on individual students’ circumstances.
Using your existing data systems to find nuance: Free lunch and direct certification are binary, meaning they reveal student poverty at a single point in time. More sophisticated approaches, such as an examination of community-level needs, can provide a broader understanding of students’ disadvantages. And, longitudinal data collected over multiple years can identify students who are experiencing chronic poverty.
Prioritizing equitable data use: “Asset framing”—or emphasizing and building on students’ strengths—allows education leaders to chart paths to better academic outcomes. Because terms such as "at risk" create negative biases against students, California is using "at promise" to describe economically disadvantaged, underachieving and chronically absent students. Parents should also be included in conversations about how and why schools are measuring need.

Several districts and municipalities are already making these shifts. Washington, D.C.’s accountability system measures SNAP/TANF participation, homelessness, and high school students who are more than a year older than the expected age for their grade. In New Mexico, the Department of Tax and Revenue must share tax return income data with the Department of Public Instruction. Students are then placed in one of five income categories to calculate a family income index for each school.

Instant Insights /

Why free lunch may no longer be the best way to measure student need

Related Stories

Recommended For You