Lunch is in Session: The Effect of the National School Lunch Program’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and Community Eligibility Provision on Student Achievement

Abstract

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is the second largest federal food and nutrition assistance program in the United States. The program’s provision of school lunches at a free or reduced-price to low-income children has the potential to affect their academic achievement by neutralizing some of the hindrances on learning associated with low socioeconomic status, including food insecurity and malnutrition. As a landmark reform to the school lunch program in the 2010s, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) and the included Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) aimed to improve the program further by making the subsidized school lunches healthier and accessible to a broader population of children. This thesis seeks to evaluate the resulting impact of the HHFKA and the CEP on the academic achievement of low-income children by looking at the educational outcomes of primary and secondary school students before and after the policies’ implementation using a reduced-form model and a two-stage least-squares model. The findings demonstrate that the HHFKA and the CEP have counteracting impacts on student achievement. The HHFKA is estimated to decrease the percentage of students performing above the proficiency level and increase the percentage of students performing below it while the CEP has the opposite effect. The effects of the HHFKA are stronger, suggesting that the reforms have an overall adverse effect on student achievement, which is likely driven by participating students’ lack of acceptance for the healthier school lunches.