Chapter 5: Weighted Student Funding with Alternatives to Free and Reduced-Price Lunch Eligibility Data

Governments have long relied upon the percentage or count of students certified eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL) to allocate funds to schools, but recent expansions of universal free school meals (spurred by changes in USDA policy) may reduce the reliability of these measures over time. This presents a challenge and an opportunity for states and school districts to consider alternative measures of economic disadvantage for need-based education aid formulas, such as weighted student funding (WSF). While readily available alternatives are somewhat limited, percentage or count measures based upon eligibility for other social supports (i.e., children experiencing homelessness, public housing residences, foster care placements, and SNAP participation, among others) or neighborhood socioeconomic conditions (such as local poverty rates) are promising due, in part, to their potential correlation with the FRPL-based measure of economic disadvantage. Whether alternative measures can serve as substitutes for the FRPL-based measure to achieve a similar funding distribution, and the extent to which such a change would disrupt funding are critical empirical questions for school financing policy and practice in an era with widespread adoption of universal free school meals. In this chapter, we examine New York City’s WSF formula, which uses a FRPL-based measure to allocate funds across schools, and consider five alternative measures of economic disadvantage. We assess suitability of these alternative measures for WSF using three criteria: (a) the extent to which measures have sufficient variation to differentiate funding need across schools, (b) the extent to which variation in each measure maps onto wide variation in expenditures per pupil, and (c) whether the relationship between measures and expenditures per pupil is monotonically positive and nearly linear. We also explore the potential disruptiveness of replacing the FRPL-based measure with one or multiple alternative measures of economic disadvantage, to shed light on whether they could be deployed in a WSF formula and effectively replicate the distribution of spending predicted by FRPL.