Title: True Or False? Free And Reduced-Price Lunch = Poor : NPR Ed : NPR
Headings: True Or False? Free And Reduced-Price Lunch = Poor
npr Ed
True Or False? Free And Reduced-Price Lunch = Poor
Origins
A 'Blunt Tool'
If Not F&R, Then What?
Fund public radio's future

Content: The headline informed readers that, for the first time in at least 50 years, a "majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty ." But that's not exactly true. And the story itself was more nuanced. It told readers that 51 percent of students receive free and reduced-price lunch. As critics quickly pointed out, that may not be the same as "living in poverty." To qualify for the school lunch program, families have to be at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level — which calculates out to about $44,000 for a family of four. So, sometimes this data is being used for something it's not. "Too many people don't give it a second thought, yet it's the most important measure for the majority of work that we do," says Bruce Baker, an education researcher at Rutgers University and blogger, who tracks assumptions about demographic data. Origins
President Harry Truman signed into law the National School Lunch Act in 1946, in part as a way to provide meals to low-income students. In 1966, as part of President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," the federal government began funneling extra money into school districts with high concentrations of poverty, as a way to blunt its effects.