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Since its implementation over a decade ago, California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) has targeted additional dollars to districts with larger shares of high need students—low-income, English Learners, and foster youth. The system has long used free and reduced-price meal (FRPM) enrollment as a proxy for income to allocate additional funding and to assess gaps in achievement. But a growing body of research identifies discrepancies between FRPM and other measures of poverty. And recent changes in federal and state policy—such as universal school meals—make it increasingly important to find alternative measures.
How accurate is FRPM as a measure of student need?
Although access to subsidized meals is means tested, FRPM is primarily a student nutrition program rather than a fundamental measurement of poverty. Indeed, school meals policy has evolved considerably over the past decade, with increasing shares of students identified as eligible directly through data matches to social safety net programs and the state expansion of universal school meals.
With these increases, however, FRPM rates have diverged from other measures of poverty, income, and socioeconomic status: while Census poverty measures show declines of around 8–9 percentage points from 2012 to 2022, FRPM rates increased nearly 2 percentage points statewide. These changes and trends complicate the usage of FRPM as a measure of need for the purposes of school funding.
FRPM is also binary: students are considered low-income whether they are in deep poverty or just below the eligibility threshold. Indeed, households both above and below the FRPM eligibility threshold (185% of poverty) have a wide range of income and socioeconomic circumstance.
There are also signs of potential misallocation. Districts with similar FRPM enrollment rates—and thus funding—can have dramatic differences in underlying economic conditions, demographics, and student outcomes. The table below provides recent data for four actual districts with similar rates and yet notable differences in other characteristics and outcomes.
Examinations of FRPM data linked to tax records in other states suggest that FRPM errors can be two-sided: missing potentially eligible low-income students and counting students whose family tax records indicate income over current thresholds. Our findings are consistent with this and reflect growing consensus among national researchers on the need to consider alternatives.
