Chapter 2: Measuring Economic Disadvantage in Schools in the Post-CEP Era

This chapter considers how recent universal meals policies, including the community eligibility program (CEP), intersect with the availability and reliability of economic disadvantage information in the common core of data (CCD). We build on work examining the divergence between free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL) and true economic disadvantage found in Oregon (from Spiegel et al., 2024), finding potential divergences of FRPL from economic disadvantage in at least 12 states. In other states, state-level imputation procedures may artificially create a correspondence between FRPL data reported in the CCD and trends in economic disadvantage. Given the documented deteriorating availability and quality of FRPL data in the CCD, we use data from Oregon to explore how to convert from measures that target below the FRPL threshold to a true FRPL threshold measure. We find that a constant multiplier cannot accurately capture true FRPL rates. Moreover, despite evidence of the potential usefulness of direct certification (DC) measures in place of FRPL, we document significant shortcomings in the coverage and reliability of direct certification data in the CCD. Together, this research underscores the limitations of CCD, FRPL, and DC data.