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Scholars Test Out New Yardsticks of School Poverty

When education researchers want to measure the collective poverty level in a school, they typically use the same yardstick: the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-rate meals under the federal school lunch program.

But dissatisfaction with that indicator is prompting some researchers to cast about for better ways to gauge the socioeconomic status of schools. While those efforts are still in the preliminary stages, they reflect a broader debate about the adequacy of federal poverty indicators and could, in the long term, influence a wide range of education policy decisions affecting poor children.

“There are problems with the free- and reduced-price-lunch measure, and if it’s not accurate, we need to fix it,” said Mark S. Schneider, the commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which is set to begin testing alternatives to...