Using American Community Survey Data to Expand Access to the School Meals Programs (2012) / Chapter Skim
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6 Recommendations for Future Work
6 Recommendations for Future Work
Pages 203-216
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From page 203... ...
IMPROVING DATA QUALITY AND AVAILABILITY The panel identified four areas of improvement for data related to the school meals programs: (1) regularly producing and disseminating ACS estimates of schoolchildren eligible for free and reduced-price meals according to our specifications, (2)
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From page 204... ...
Census Bureau to produce improved annual school district-level estimates (and their standard errors) for total enrollment and per centages of students eligible for free, reduced-price, and full-price meals under the school meals programs from the American Com munity Survey.
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From page 205... ...
Additionally, both sources could be improved by incorporating specific indicators for data that are missing versus true zeros, and both systems would benefit from improved editing to address data entry errors. Recommendation 2: The Food and Nutrition Service and the National Center for Education Statistics should work together with their respondents -- states and school districts -- to understand the differences between reporting in the Common Core of Data and on form FNS-742, and implement improvements to make the two data sources as consistent as possible while clearly documenting neces sary and legitimate distinctions between them.
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From page 206... ...
. To enhance the availability of data at a lower level of aggregation than the state, FNS should pursue obtaining data on the number of meals served by eligibility category and on average daily participation for the month of October that are linkable to certification data by category at the school district level for all school districts in the nation.
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From page 207... ...
FNS should first collaborate with selected school districts and states on a feasibility study to develop meaningful working definitions of the costs that need to be tracked and then illustrate the application of these definitions by collecting cost data in a randomly selected sample of districts. Recommendation 4: The Food and Nutrition Service should study the feasibility of developing a program for periodic collection of data on administrative costs in the school meals programs.
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From page 208... ...
Regardless of how attractive any of the special provisions may be to local operators of the school meals programs who would like to benefit more low-income children by expanding access to free school meals, the need to provide data for other critical programs may discourage them from adopting a special provision.7 The Department of Education memorandum applies only to reporting of data under the ESEA, and does not apply to requirements to qualify individual students for income-conditioned benefits offered by schools or states. One option would be for states or school districts to allow schools 6Memorandum from Carl Harris, deputy assistant secretary of education, to state commissioners of education, dated May 20, 2011; refer back to Chapter 2 for details.
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From page 209... ...
Department of Education guidance that permits schools operating under a special provision for school meals to use alternative data for Department of Education purposes for which traditional National School Lunch Program certification data would otherwise be used. The Food and Nutrition Service should also encourage state and local authorities to allow districts that choose to operate under a special school meals provision to use alternative, specified data or methods for determin ing aggregate and individual measures of economic status for other income-conditioned benefits or reporting.8 IMPROVING ACS ESTIMATES The panel identified two research areas for improving ACS estimates.
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From page 210... ...
Another source of information with which to evaluate our definition of an economic unit might be based on simulations with ACS data using the Minnesota Population Center's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) methodology of imputing household relationships instead of our assumptions.9 Recommendation 6: The Food and Nutrition Service should support research to assess the quality of the panel's definition of an eco nomic unit for use in determining eligibility for the school meals programs from the American Community Survey and suggest alter natives that would improve that definition.
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From page 211... ...
Department of Education and the Food and Nutrition Service should agree that school districts that choose to participate in the American Community Survey Eligi bility Option may use data other than traditional certification of eligibility for school meals for individual and aggregate reporting of economically disadvantaged children under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. In particular, the panel suggests that for aggregate reporting, a district should use its most recent benchmarked American Community Survey eligibility estimates, and that for individual reporting, a district should be allowed to designate all students enrolled in an American Community Survey Eligibility Option school as economically disadvantaged.
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From page 212... ...
Recommendation 9: The Food and Nutrition Service should provide technical assistance to help states and districts understand, evaluate the feasibility of, and implement the school meals American Com munity Survey Eligibility Option. This assistance should include easy-to-understand documentation and an American Community Survey Eligibility Option Calculator for districts to use in working with American Community Survey estimates of students eligible for the school meals programs.
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From page 213... ...
Recommendation 11: The Food and Nutrition Service should pro vide technical assistance to school districts that wish to participate in the American Community Survey Eligibility Option only for a school or group of schools with respect to sources for and prepara tion of the geographic boundary information for school attendance areas needed to derive American Community Survey eligibility estimates for the school meals programs. The AEO should be evaluated carefully in districts that are early adopters.
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From page 214... ...
The findings from such monitoring should be used to evaluate the potential effects of school choice on the accuracy of eligibility per centages estimated for the American Community Survey Eligibility Option, that is, eligibility percentages based on residence in the catchment area of a school or district rather than on actual enroll ment in the school or district. Ideally, the ACS would itself provide additional detail on types of schools attended in addition to simply public versus private.
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From page 215... ...
Recommendation 15: The Food and Nutrition Service should spon sor research to develop and test a global predictive model for devel oping American Community Survey estimates of eligibility that are benchmarked to certification data for the school meals programs. The specification and implementation of ACS school district-level model-based eligibility estimates produced by the Census Bureau and their subsequent evaluation by the panel took place in a brief time period.
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From page 216... ...
to prepare the American Community Survey small-area model-based estimates of eligibility percentages for free and reduced-price meals.
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