Using free and reduced-price meal (FRPM) enrollment as a proxy to identify how much additional funding local educational agencies receive under California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) may be leaving out children and undercutting schools’ efforts to support them.
LCFF allocates additional funding to LEAs with larger shares of high-need students including English learners, low-income and foster youth in an effort to ensure schools with higher need are better equipped to provide students additional supports to close achievement and opportunity gaps.
However, according to a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a growing body of research has found discrepancies between FRPM and other measures of poverty, suggesting a need to identity alternative measures.
“California’s TK–12 system has long used free and reduced-price meal enrollment as a proxy for income to allocate additional funding and assess gaps in achievement,” the report states. “But recent changes in policy — such as universal school meals — make it increasingly important to find alternative measures. Furthermore, focusing only on whether students meet a given income threshold misses important differences throughout the income distribution — for instance lacking the nuance to distinguish deep poverty from near-poverty.”
PPIC notes that while access to subsidized meals is a strong factor in determining poverty level, FRPM is primarily a student nutrition program rather than a fundamental measurement of poverty, and with the recent embracing of universal school meals and other recent policy shifts, it is becoming even less useful in identifying students.
Simply using FRPM shares across districts masks considerable differences in underlying socioeconomic conditions and educational outcomes, according to researchers. “Districts with the same FRPM share — and in turn, funding under LCFF — can have vastly different levels of income, poverty, and housing wealth,” the report states.
Recommendations
In addition to making recommendations related to considering new alternatives to FRPM for measuring low-income status and exploring ways to automatically identify low-income students based on income and/or safety net records, researchers called on the state to:
Explore methods to incorporate broader community characteristics and income levels. Because community conditions play a critical role in children’s educational opportunity and outcomes, targeting funding based on these underlying characteristics could better address gaps in test scores and other outcomes, according to researchers. Incorporating Census data or the Strong Start Index directly into the high-need weight, into an alternative concentration grant component or as a third “grant” in the formula could prove beneficial for students.
Consider using duplicated counts for English learner, foster youth and homeless students. Duplicated counts, which provide additional funding for students who fall into multiple categories of disadvantage (such as low-income English learner students), would better reflect the educational needs and could improve local programmatic capabilities, allowing districts to more effectively serve diverse student populations. “Most other states that use a weighted formula allow for separate funding weights for different populations,” according to researchers. “While such changes would undoubtedly complicate California’s formula, flexibility in district spending could be maintained to avoid a return to the heavy reliance on categorical funding prominent prior to LCFF.”
