Chapter 3: Understanding School-Level Funding And Student Poverty: An Assessment Using Traditional and New Measures of Student Need

The traditional definition of student poverty—the share of students eligible for free and reduced-price school meals—has changed in recent years, and researchers and policymakers alike have searched for new, more consistent alternatives. However, each of these alternative measures captures different student populations and poverty thresholds and can have implications for measuring the progressivity of school funding. We use school-level data and three different methods to compare states’ spending progressivity (or regressivity) across six measures of student poverty, including the Urban Institute’s modeled estimates of poverty in schools (MEPS). We find the type of low-income measure used to identify progressivity and the associated definition of need (i.e., poverty threshold) matters for the assessment of state progressivity, even if trends across measures are relatively consistent. Because each measure implies a slightly different distribution of school-level poverty, and there is still a need to identify the “true” underlying individual-level economic segregation across schools, how and when to use these measures depends on the context and goals of the analysis.