Feeding kids better food leads to better educational outcomes

In a finding which should surprise no one, but has yet to be applied anywhere outside of Margaret McKenna continuing to advocate for universal breakfast*, it turns out that feeding kids better quality food makes a difference:

Test score data from some 9,700 elementary, middle, and high schools found that contracting with a healthy meal vendor correlated with increased student performance by between .03 and .04 standard deviations—a statistically significant improvement for economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students, Anderson said, adding that the size of the effect “is not huge … but it is notable.”

Not only that? It's cheaper than other options:

What’s more, he said, districts are almost getting these improvements free of charge. After tabulating the average price per meal in the vendor contracts—and estimating the cost of in-house school meals based on National School Lunch Program reimbursements—the study found that it cost about $222 per student per year to switch from in-house school-lunch preparation to a healthier lunch vendor that correlated with a rise of 0.1 standard deviations in the student’s test score.
To put that statistic into perspective, healthier meals could raise student achievement by about 4 percentile points on average.
In comparison, it cost $1,368 per year to raise a student’s test score by 0.1 standard deviations in the Tennessee STAR experiment, a project that studied the effects of class-size on student achievement in elementary school. The paper notes that established research in the field supports the need for “lower-cost policies with modest effects on student test scores [that] may generate a better return than costly policies with larger absolute effects.” 

Plus, it's FEEDING HUNGRY KIDS:

Test score data from some 9,700 elementary, middle, and high schools found that contracting with a healthy meal vendor correlated with increased student performance by between .03 and .04 standard deviations—a statistically significant improvement for economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students, Anderson said, adding that the size of the effect “is not huge … but it is notable.”

The full report can be found here. LET'S START APPLYING THIS!

*Okay, that's an exaggeration. Districts and schools have been doing this. The state and the fed should be pushing it, though.