ENG/SP Reading Comprehension L.

Suronyimpa
DSS
Topic: Healthy Life Style Date:

BROWN CENTER CHALKBOARD

How the quality of school lunch affects

Wednesday, May 3, 2017 (BROWN CENTER CHALKBOARD)

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The main
goal of the law was to raise the minimum nutritional standards for public school lunches
served as part of the National School Lunch Program. The policy discussion surrounding
the new law centered on the underlying health reasons for offering more nutritious school
lunches, in particular, concern over the number of children who are overweight.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in five children in the United States
is obese.
Surprisingly, the debate over the new law involved very little discussion as to whether
providing a more nutritious school lunch could improve student learning. A lengthy
medical literature examines the link between diet and cognitive development, and diet
and cognitive function. The medical literature focuses on the biological and chemical
mechanisms regarding how specific nutrients and compounds are thought to
affect physical development (e.g., sight), cognition (e.g., concentration, memory),
and behavior (e.g., hyperactivity). Nevertheless, what is lacking in the medical literature
is direct evidence on how nutrition impacts educational achievement.
We attempt to fill this gap in a new study that measures the effect of offering healthier
public school lunches on end of year academic test scores for public school students in
California. The study period covers five academic years (2008-2009 to 2012-2013) and
includes all public schools in the state that report test scores (about 9,700 schools,
mostly elementary and middle schools). Rather than focus on changes in national
nutrition standards, we instead focus on school-specific differences in lunch quality over
time. Specifically, we take advantage of the fact that schools can choose to contract with
private companies of varying nutritional quality to prepare the school lunches. About 12
percent of California public schools contract with a private lunch company during our
study period. School employees completely prepare the meals in-house for 88 percent of
the schools.
To determine the quality of different private companies, nutritionists at the Nutrition
Policy Institute analyzed the school lunch menus offered by each company. The
nutritional quality of the menus was scored using the Healthy Eating Index (HEI). The
HEI is a continuous score ranging from zero to 100 that uses a well-established food
component analysis to determine how well food offerings (or diets) match the Dietary
Guidelines for Americans. The HEI is the Department of Agriculture’s preferred measure
of diet quality, and the agency uses it to “examine relationships between diet and health-
related outcomes, and to assess the quality of food assistance packages, menus, and
the US food supply.” The average HEI score for the U.S. population is 63.8, while the
median HEI score in our study is 59.9. In other words, the typical private company
providing public school lunch in CA is a bit less healthy than the average American diet.
We measure the relationship between having a lunch prepared by a standard (below
median HEI) or healthy (above median HEI) company relative to in-house preparation by
school staff. Our model estimates the effect of lunch quality on student achievement
using year-to-year changes between in-house preparation of school meals and outside
vendors of varying menu quality, within a given school. We control for grade, school, and
year factors, as well as specific student and school characteristics including race, English
learner, low family income, school budget, and student-to-teacher ratios.
We find that in years when a school contracts with a healthy lunch company, students at
the school score better on end-of-year academic tests. On average, student test scores
are 0.03 to 0.04 standard deviations higher (about 4 percentile points). Not only that, the
test score increases are about 40 percent larger for students who qualify for reduced-
price or free school lunches. These students are also the ones who are most likely to eat
the school lunches.

[…] We also examine whether healthier school lunches lead to a reduction in the number
of overweight students. We follow previous literature and use whether a student’s body
composition (i.e. body fat) is measured to be outside the healthy zone on the Presidential
Fitness Test. We find no evidence that having a healthier school lunch reduces the
number of overweight students. There are a few possible interpretations of this finding,
including that a longer time period may be necessary to observe improvements in health,
the measure of overweight is too imprecise, or that students are eating the same amount
[…]

Michael L. Anderson
Associate Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics - University of California, Berkeley

Justin Gallagher
Assistant Professor of Economics - Case Western Reserve University

Elizabeth Ramirez Ritchie

Brown Center Chalkboard

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/05/03/how-the-quality-of-school-
lunch-affects-students-academic-performance/
Memorandum For: Tiny Mouse Nursery
School
Date: 05.03.2018 by:
Subject: The quality of school meals & its impact on academic performance
1. What did the politicians want to achieve with the new law?
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2. What was one main aspect in the debate surrounding the new law?
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3. What aspect was much less discussed in the debate surrounding the new law?
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4. What do the authors of the text want to achieve with their study?
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5. How long is the study period?
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6. Who will be part of the study?
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7. What was done to check the quality of the food private companies provide for
schools.
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 8. What did the researchers find out when they compared the average HEI
(Healthy Eating Index) score for the U.S. population and the HEI score in their
study? __/2
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9. What was the general result of the study concerning the impact of healthy food
on academic performance?
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10. On which students does the provision of healthier school meals have the highest
impact? __/2
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11. What do the authors say about the impact of healthier lunches on the number of
obese students?
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Total points: ___/20