Better Lunch, Better Test Scores
I think it’s pretty intuitive that better-nourished kids will do better in school, via Ezra Klein comes Tim Harford explaining that the combination of Jamie Oliver’s drive for better school lunches and the UK’s rather comprehensive testing let us put the proposition to the test:
Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.
Of course there’s a strain of liberal in the United States which holds that it’s illegitimate to use student test scores as a way of measuring the efficacy of education policies. But from where I sit this looks pretty convincing. Meanwhile on the flipside there’s an unfortunate tendency in some education policy circles to act as if we should only try to improve student performance through methods that antagonize teacher’s unions. But better lunch works too, it seems.
68 Responses to “Better Lunch, Better Test Scores”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
November 11th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
As usual, Matthew seems to think that correlation is the same thing as causation. Odd that a philosophy major would make that error.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Al,
That is a bit unfair to MY. Read paragraph three of the article he linked to:
What caught the attention of Michele Belot and Jonathan James, though, was the way Oliver’s project had been implemented. Belot and James – economists at Nuffield College, Oxford, and at the University of Essex respectively – noted that the campaign had created a near-perfect experiment. The chef had convinced Greenwich’s council and schools to change menus to fit his scheme; he mobilised resources, provided equipment and trained dinner ladies. Other London boroughs with similar demographics received none of these advantages – and indeed, because the programme wasn’t broadcast until after the project was well under way, probably knew little about it. The result was a credible pilot project. It wasn’t quite up to the gold standard of a randomised trial, but it wasn’t far off.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
So.. Vegtables don’t have fat? Fruits somehow became sugar free?
I have to imagine they changed the level of protein. Historically speaking, protein is what makes people smarter.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Do some liberals really think test scores are “illegitimate”? I’d say I’m a VERY liberal education policy wonk, and the worst that I hear is that test scores alone are simply not a very fine-grained measure of the success of a given policy. First, the population attending public schools is way too heterogenous to generalize from a single measure. And next, there are way too many factors contributing to academic success, and the most important of those have nothing to do with the school setting.
Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear from this and many other studies that kids (and adults!) who are better nourished perform better cognitively.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Al: Correlation does not imply causation, but the whole point of experimentation is that they focus attention more on causation. They didn’t merely observe that schools which had healthy lunches did better, they actively foisted healthy lunches onto some schools and observed that better grades happened in those schools. It’s entirely possible that there are other forces at work (perhaps schools which would have improved anyway were more likely to agree to this sort of thing) but this sort of experiment strips out a lot of the other confounding variables, and makes the case for a casual relationship more persuasive.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
The “liberal strain of thought” is not that test scores lack meaning or are not useful. It is just that they are not the end all and be all of education. And if everything–the existence of schools, teachers jobs or their pay, federal funding, the curriculum, who is willing to settle in what town of district–is determined by test scores, you will eventually narrow, cheapen, and destroy public education (we have gone a good piece in that direction). You will especially destroy some of the most redeeming features of American public education.
(And I am not sure why you’ve labeled it “liberal” I consider my critique a scientific or measurement theory critique. Rhetorically, I suppose you want to claim that mine is driven by harden ideology. Nice, that)
November 11th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Soullite: Actually, vegetables ARE lower in fat than most of the crap most kids eat. And fruits are high in sugar, but also high in antioxidants and nutrients, while processed foods are not.
Um… protein? Ok, so more protein = smarter people, right? So we can assume that Americans are the smartest people on the planet, followed by the Australians, and in dead last come the Asians, who eat a starch based diet with only moderate protein…
Oh wait…
November 11th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Managment accounting for the win! Only what gets measured counts!
But dont worry, i am not liberal.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Note, one should only measure the things in those standardiced student performance tests tests!
Just like GM only measures how much it costs to build one car
.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Ok so in hindsight my sarcasm was a little bit obnoxious, but I really would be interested in hearing for the justification that protein is the biggest indicator of brain power, when carbs are the brain’s main source of energy.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
noted that the campaign had created a near-perfect experiment. The chef had convinced Greenwich’s council and schools to change menus to fit his scheme; he mobilised resources, provided equipment and trained dinner ladies. Other London boroughs with similar demographics received none of these advantages
How is this a “near perfect experiment”? Does this really exclude every reasonably possible other cause of the improvement?
November 11th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Al didn’t get where he is by reading all the way to paragraph 3 and understanding the scientific method.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Fruits somehow became sugar free?
Presumably they mean refined sugars.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Wouldn’t be a Yglesias education post without a gratuitous shot at teachers and their unions. Stay classy Matt.
Smarmy trust-fund kid beating up on working class folks from his comfortable perch at a think tank? Really?
November 11th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
“Of course there’s a strain of liberal in the United States which holds that it’s illegitimate to use student test scores as a way of measuring the efficacy of education policies.”
Depends.
Just because it is a test doesn’t mean that it measures student achievement, and if it doesn’t measure achievement then changes don’t measure the efficacy of policy shifts.
Furthermore, this is not a controlled variable experiment. The policy change is not the only variable in play in this system. There are ways to estimate statistically the amount of change that can be attributed to a specific variable in these situations but saying “we changed this and then that changed” is not one of them. If they also had a change in this year’s adolescent shoe fad, the evidence for its causality in rising test scores would be just as strong.
This particular strain of liberal holds that it is bad to base policy on shitty statistics. Your personal strain of liberal should also believe that.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Like Al I’m skeptical.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I remember teaching at a school where all kids qualified for free breakfasts and lunches. One morning, the breakfast was two donuts. DONUTS.
The kids were off the freaking wall all morning. And around 11 or so, they got snippy and crashed. Just a nightmare day. And not a day I was able to advance my lesson plan about fractions.
Of course kids will do better at everything when you feed them food that isn’t garbage. They will be healthier. They will learn more in school. They will be better able to control themselves. I think it’s wonderful that Oliver et al actually quantified this, but it’s patently insane they had to.
This is a no-brainer.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Fruits are high in fructose, which is metabolized very slowly and thus does not cause blood-sugar and insulin spikes that make kids momentarily hyperactive and permanently diabetic.
Fat the macronutrient has the misfortune of having the same name as fat the description of overweight people and fat the adipose tissue. High-fat vegetables and fruits like olives and avocado have fats that are better for you certainly than the fat in meat and also the fat in soybean and corn oils, which are artificially cheap thanks to the life-destroying lobbying of the corn and soybean industries, which is to say, most of American vegetable agriculture.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Wow, Steve Balboni, you sure nailed him on the merits of his position there.
I, too, would think it a gross over-generalization to say that liberals are opposed to any use of test score data, if I didn’t keep hearing liberals who say just that. My favorite is when teachers, who should really know how this stuff works, pretend that “merit pay” would mean just paying more money to teachers whose students get better scores. As opposed to paying them more when the students they’re teaching improve from one year to the next, which is the way it actually works everywhere it’s been tried.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Re: Like Al I’m skeptical.
Of course, Hova. We live in a skeptical age, in which skepticism is cool, and all the cool dudes at the Georgetown cocktail parties dress in black, smoke herbal cigarettes, and babble in recycled Foucauldian phrases about how they’re skeptical of this and that. They begin by being skeptical of the existence of God, and end by being skeptical of the most common sense and obvious facts of nature and society, such as that undernourished kids and malnourished kids tend not to do well in school compared to their better nourished peers. As the old saying goes, sin makes you stupid.
Sensible people, of course, realized this long ago, and we didn’t need a study to prove the bleeding obvious. I have worked a little bit in schools in the past, in an inner city section of an East Coast city and in rural African villages, and it’s very obvious to me, from personal observation, that malnourished children are at a serious drawback in their ability to learn. But of course, the chattering classes of America don’t like to hear this. Because it means they might actually feel guilty about spending their money on Hennessey and U2 tickets, instead of donating that money to Africa. So I’m not surprised why many people nowadays claim to be ’skeptical’ of the obvious. However, it seems to me that this knee jerk skepticism, for obviously self-interested reasons, is hardly very morally compelling.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Re: Of course kids will do better at everything when you feed them food that isn’t garbage. They will be healthier. They will learn more in school. They will be better able to control themselves. I think it’s wonderful that Oliver et al actually quantified this, but it’s patently insane they had to.This is a no-brainer.
No kidding, Anon. As John Maynard Keynes used to say, never underestimate people’s inability to grasp facts that would pose a threat to their lifestyle.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Wait I thought you disapproved of Jamie Oliver’s hobby? But seriously the objections to this project are pretty lame.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
The only thing that convinces me that Hector is for real is that no satire could be so hilariously bizarre. I’m trying really hard to picture a black-clad hipster who goes to Georgetown cocktail parties (!), smokes herbal cigarettes, talks Foucault, drinks Hennessy and listens to U2. That’s mixing like 8 different subculture stereotypes. I do hope I meet such a person, because he sounds interesting.
Anyway, it’s knee-jerk *contranianism* that’s annoying. Knee-jerk skepticism is something we should all aspire to. Lots of things we think are obviously true do turn out to be true upon further study. But lots of things we think are obviously true turn out to be bullshit.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Mostly Wrong! Fructose is very easily digested and causes massive blood sugar spikes. In fact, fruit juice is nearly as bad as any soft-drink. Whole fruit however, usually has a good deal of fiber mixed in that can slow the digestion and thus the uptake of that fructose.
The primary bit of data I gather from this article is that these kids are healthier and able to attend school more often. The improved testing is a result of higher attendance.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Count me among the unsurprised. My grandmother had a saying, roughly translated from Italian: “fish for study, pasta for sport, vegetables everyday” And she had the equivalent of a fourth grade education.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I did a little research, and it seems that fructose indeed causes a blood sugar spike as intense as glucose’s, but that lasts for less time than glucose’s does. It doesn’t stimulate insulin release, but evidently can still contribute to metabolic syndrome. So my (partial) bad.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
The only thing that convinces me that Hector is for real is that no satire could be so hilariously bizarre. I’m trying really hard to picture a black-clad hipster who goes to Georgetown cocktail parties (!), smokes herbal cigarettes, talks Foucault, drinks Hennessy and listens to U2. That’s mixing like 8 different subculture stereotypes. I do hope I meet such a person, because he sounds interesting.
Hector’s real, he’s just very, very stupid, as evidenced by his habit of repeating the same non-clever locutions over and over and over again. “Yglesian hipsters,” “p*t, P*rn, and Pl*yst*ti*ns”, etc. For a while he was trying to introduce a new one, “wrong-o”, but he’s back to his old stable.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Huh. I think feeding kids better food is a good thing to do even if there’s no immediately visible effect on scores. But I’m pretty skeptical that the improvement in scores seen here had much to do with nutrition. Isn’t there a well known experiment in industrial efficiency where someone was trying to determine optimum light levels for some task, and brightened the lights in the factory: productivity went up. And then lowered them: productivity went up again. The fact that experimenters were fussing with their working conditions focused the workers on what they were doing, regardless of the actual light levels.
I’d guess that the fuss around the new celebrity-driven lunch program is what did the trick in Greenwich, not the nutritional improvement. It’s still worth improving school lunches even if the scores thing doesn’t pan out, though.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
I, too, would think it a gross over-generalization to say that liberals are opposed to any use of test score data, if I didn’t keep hearing liberals who say just that. My favorite is when teachers, who should really know how this stuff works, pretend that “merit pay” would mean just paying more money to teachers whose students get better scores. As opposed to paying them more when the students they’re teaching improve from one year to the next, which is the way it actually works everywhere it’s been tried.
Right, because obviously all kids learn at the same rate, so if you control for how much the kids already know, then you’ve completely controlled for differences between students.
That is what you would have to think for your post to make sense.
And as to Yglesias’s original sniping at teachers, there’s a huge difference between using changes in test scores to compare individual teachers and schools, who have different student populations, and using changes in test scores to measure different policies applied to the same schools at different times.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Right, because obviously all kids learn at the same rate, so if you control for how much the kids already know, then you’ve completely controlled for differences between students.
Of course not. But if the teacher has 30 kids in his class every year, it doesn’t take long to get a pretty good sample size. If this teacher’s students are consistently scoring worse than they did the year before — and there’s no similar decline among other teachers at that grade level — then guess what, we probably have a shitty teacher on our hands.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
> Of course there’s a strain of liberal in the United States
> which holds that it’s illegitimate to use student test scores
> as a way of measuring the efficacy of education policies.
Mr. Yglesias,
I would expect that you are now a bit more than halfway through your first semester of volunteering at your local elementary school there in DC. How is that going? What have you learned, and perhaps more importantly what have you found out not to be true that you thought was true when you started?
Just wondering.
Cranky
November 11th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
LizardBreath: This is known as the Hawthorne Effect, named after analysis of experiments in Hawthorne Works factory, conducted in the 1920s.
Completely off-topic, Levitt has a working paper in which he reanalyzed the data from the original experiment and claims that there was no Hawthorne effect in the Hawthorne study. It’s still contested.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
I made the mistake of attempting to visualize the hipster with black pants and a black U2 shirt, with an herbal cigarette in one hand and a glass of Hennessy in the other, talking about Foucault at a Georgetown cocktail party, and found the image so ridiculous I spat out the probiotic yogurt I was eating with my high-end Ikea spoon onto the screen of my red MacBook Pro while getting my soul patch and designer stubble all yogurty, too. Fortunately, I can easily afford a new one thanks to my trust fund. In the mean time, I’ll just sit back and finish reading Infinite Jest while having illegal immigrants manscape my chest and thirteen-year-old girls suck on my black-nailpolished toes after swallowing the organic quaaludes I have my doorman feed them.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Oh, wait, shit! I’m late for Burning Man! Better transfer my pirated hip-hop songs onto my iPhone and hop into the Prius with my token gay and Jewish friends for a work-week roadtrip!
November 11th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Jason L: Bravo. The first Hector Porn. Er, sorry, “p*rn.”
November 11th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Of course there’s a strain of liberal in the United States which holds that it’s illegitimate to use student test scores as a way of measuring the efficacy of education policies.
That’s a straw man. It is the use of standardized test scores as the exclusive means of measuring efficacy that is at issue.
Your transformation into a media pundit is now complete.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
But if the teacher has 30 kids in his class every year, it doesn’t take long to get a pretty good sample size.
I know when I was in elementary school, there wasn’t a random distribution of students even where it would make sense to do so One teacher went on sabbatical and the substitute for that year got all the worst behaving students.
But even if you prevent that funny business (which I’m sure will be easy once pay checks are at stake), you’ve still got the problem of different schools in the same district but different neighborhoods performing differently. You’ve got classes that are explicitly tracked according to how well students perform into remedial, average, and advanced classes. You’ve got special education students who tend to be outliers at the top and bottom which completely ruins year to year comparisons.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Jason L. wins the internets!
November 11th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Hector shouldlearn the difference between skepticism and cynicism. Skepticism is essential for anyone in an important decision making position.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I can say from experience that if I eat junk food I don’t think as clearly on the job as I do when I eat nutritious food. I also remember when I was in school that the cafeteria food was garbage. I don’t mean garbage as in it tasted so bad (which it did), but garbage as in the kind of super cheap, heavily processed crap that is devoid of nutritional value.
I seem to remember the book Fast Food Nation mentioning a similar type of experiment done somewhere. I think they found that discipline problems went down as well as improved student performance.
You alway hear people talk about how precious our children are and how they are our most valuable resource and all of that. The junk fed to kids through school lunch programs suggest otherwise.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I think it’s rather disappointing, but all too typical, that the peanut gallery chooses to laugh at some of the images I chose to illustrate my point, while ignoring the point itself (which is that nutrition does affect one’s ability to learn and to work, and that a civilised society would base its public policy upon that fact). Of course, it demonstrates rather well the well known fact that the chattering classes in today’s West are more interested in style than in substance.
November 11th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
“I think it’s rather disappointing, but all too typical, that the peanut gallery chooses to laugh at some of the images I chose to illustrate my point, while ignoring the point itself (which is that nutrition does affect one’s ability to learn and to work, and that a civilised society would base its public policy upon that fact).”
Maybe if you didn’t surround your points with absurd imagery, people would take your points more seriously. I agree that sufficient and nutritious school lunches would be very valuable public policy, but I’m damned if I read your comment and thought, “There’s an ally I should cultivate!” You actually derail plenty of threads, and alienate plenty of potential allies, with repetitive and tedious attacks on your bugbears.
November 11th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Matt —
You might want to check out this recent article from the NYTimes, for a little explanation of why some of us are opposed to using test scores as the basis for “reform.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/education/15scores.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=naep&st=cse
There are test scores, in other words, and there are test scores. As the article makes clear, the state test scores that get touted by politicians who want to claim success in the ed. policies are often at odds with the federal NAEP scores, which are considered the gold standard. Why are they the gold standard? Because they are administered anonymously and randomly, so that it becomes very hard to prep for them. And since there are no consequences to scoring well or badly on them, there is no reason to prep for them.
This means that they measure whether students are actually learning to read, write and do math, as opposed to measuring whether Princeton Review or Stanley Kaplan was brought in to teach the teachers how to teach the kids to game the tests.
Most liberals I know who oppose using test scores don’t mind the NAEP scores as a way of figuring out where the real problems are, and where the real successes are. But as soon as you make test scores the only measure (and they become the only measure, since they are the cheapest way to measure, and the most “quantifiable” (drunk looking for keys under lamp-post situation)), then teaching to the test begins. And teaching to the test sucks, both for those doing the teaching and those being taught.
November 11th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
The loudest critics of the use of tests and scores for anything are education majors. Perhaps coincidentally, they are also the people who tend themselves to score the worst on such tests. See, e.g., GRE scores from the ETS.
November 11th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
I think it’s rather disappointing, but all too typical, that the peanut gallery chooses to laugh at some of the images I chose to illustrate my point,
It’s because your images aren’t just illustrative, they’re a core component of how you see the world, ie you vs. “hipsters”, and they’re so far removed from reality that it makes you into a joke.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
To add to what Anthony just said, your images suggest that you don’t actually know anything about the people you deride. There are a lot of things you don’t like about modern Western civilization, criticizing them in context, you just toss them all in together as “Yglesian hipsterdom” and sound like an eccentric uncle nattering to himself in his armchair. If you want to attack postmodern skepticism of science, go for it, and you will probably find a lot of people here who will engage you and to varying extents agree with you. But that’s less likely to happen if you equate postmodern skepticism of science and styles of dress and cosmopolitanism and certain recreational preferences and attitudes toward religion and on and on and on.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
The second sentence of #46 should read, “There are a lot of things you don’t like about modern Western civilization, but instead of criticizing them in context, you just toss them all in together as “Yglesian hipsterdom” and sound like an eccentric uncle nattering to himself in his armchair.”
November 11th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
@UserGoogol #5,
Forget about Al. He’s a lost cause that just blurts out right wing talking point with little or no relationship to the topic at hand.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Not only more nutritious school lunches, but also school breakfast programs are needed. Classes for parents on how to prepare a nutritious meals would not hurt either. Ideally, programs to make sure that kids are getting the nutrients they need to grow should begin at birth. In studies looking at factors that contribute to differences in IQ scores, nutrition constantly comes up as one of the strongest correlates. Getting the right amount of protein seems especially important. Malnutrition during birth is one of the strongest risk factors for low IQ scores and attentional difficulties, both of which contribute to reduced school performance.
In way its common sense- the brain, which is the organ used in learning, is a biological system, and biological systems that get less nutrients during their growth phases do not grow as much. A factor that compounds this is the fact that the brain is extremely expensive, in terms of calories required to develop and run, so, if the body is starved of resources, one of the first areas that the body cuts back on is cranial development. When it comes to shear survival, we have potential brain development to spare.
A final factor the underlines the importance of nutrition to cognitive development is that global increases in the amount and quality of calories consumed by kids is one of the hypothesized reasons behind the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect, for those that do not know, is the observed global increase in IQ scores over the past century.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Hey, anon, they should have put some ketchup on those donuts. Al will explain to you how he learned from Ronald Reagan how ketchup becomes a nutritious vegetable when fed to poor kids.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:28 am
This is a no-brainer. Fruits and vegetables are good for you. Are people really going to debate this? Do you really hate children? I mean we know Al hates children, but why feed the trolls. The Republicans were wrong to cut school lunches back in the 90s, they did it because they hate children, let’s move on and never vote Republican again.
November 12th, 2009 at 4:49 am
People, this isn’t whether or not improving diet improves performance, that is a well known fact. The question is whether or not we can improve school performance by some significant amount by changing the diet of students in an area we can control: what they eat at lunch. This indicates that there are still low hanging fruits to be plucked in improving the quality of our educational systems.
Had the study produced dismal results (say only a few percent difference), we would instead be talking about how ‘well it’s obvious that it’s not JUST about lunch. If a student has a bad dinner and breakfast, and eats poorly the half of the year he’s not in school, or god-forbid eats nothing at all…” Or something else inane like “Well of course giving everyone a fancy lunch isn’t going to do much. Lunches are fine as they are!” Or “Once we get past a certain nutritional point (the basics), there’s decreasing returns!”
The result only appears obvious because you don’t consider the alternatives.
The question is now, /what now/? I propose that the next bill that would propose something expensive like class size reduction or computers in the class room or loan forgiveness to teachers, we instead spend all that money on a national initiative to improve the quality of food in schools. Assuming the rest of the study works out and it can be nationalized.
November 12th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Apropos the first comment: there is nothing more dangerous than a little knowledge.
On the substance, it would be easy to lose sight of the main point here. Most people who sit tests wish to do well in them. That a dietary change should produce such a marked improvement suggests a dramatic systemic improvement in the children, of which the test score are but a symptom, one that may motivate people that don’t care about overall well-being (or even believe it exists as a coherent idea). Everybody should be able to agree that this is worth pursuing.
November 12th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Other than maybe the first four records (through the Unforgettable Fire), I’m not a fan, but is there a band that is more mocked by hipsters, or more beloved in the developing world, than U2? I’ve seen more U2 shirts on Thai fishermen and Guatelmalan farmers than I have in US cities.
November 12th, 2009 at 8:45 am
As a mom of two just-grown children, I can tell you there’s one other thing that helps: school bathrooms that are safe, clean, and work. The bathrooms and the lunch signal a body’s safe to work in the environs.
November 12th, 2009 at 9:31 am
It should be recognised that at least in the developing world, school lunches are known to improve _attendance_ at school as well (which is a big deal especially in societies where children might otherwise be working- probably not so relevent in USA).
School breakfast is important too, and some schools (including the charter school where I used to volunteer in Boston) do provide them. The more nutrition you can make available to young people, the better.
Parenthetically, I’d be interested to know if anyone has done studies on vitamin/mineral deficiencies in the diets of poorer people in this country- I’m sure malnutrition is a big problem but it would be good to have the scope & intensity of the problem quantified.
November 12th, 2009 at 9:35 am
As a member of a black clad, clove cigarette-smoking subclture, I an insulted that Hector associated us with Georgetown, cocktail parties, and U2. I will let the Foucault reference pass– there was always someone among us who developed an affection for him.
Also, really U2? An affection for U2 is part of any Christian’s typical highlighting of the sort of pop music that he likes. Every Catholic priest and mainstream Protestant pastor has worked in a U2 reference in one of his sermons at some point in his career.
November 12th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Just to clarify. I like U2 as well, and was not using them as an example of postmodern triviality. Rather, I was using the act of _going to a U2 concert_ as an example of conspicuous consumption which should be foregone in favor of donating that money to Catholic Relief Services or another charity of one’s choice.
November 12th, 2009 at 10:46 am
If a teacher has 30 kids in each class, that’s a fucking tragedy in and of itself. We need to bring class sizes down in poorly performing areas. But of course, most of those are awful tax bases and therefore we can’t. Rich and poor, stay the same.
November 12th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Hector,
If you do a google search you will find numerous studies on nutrition and development. Malnutrition can retard development. Lack of protiens can stunt growth, and lack of vitamins and minerals can slow mental development. This is all well known, which is why these findings are unsurprising.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:56 am
I’d just like to add that even though I agree with most above about Hector, I would surely miss the almost daily references to “Liberal Hipsters” which give me a great laugh in my workday.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Do the reverse experiment. Starve people first for a couple of years and then test their educational achievement.
I bet you’ll get lower test scores than the well-fed control group.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Meanwhile on the flipside there’s an unfortunate tendency in some education policy circles to act as if we should only try to improve student performance through methods that antagonize teacher’s unions.
Holy mackerel! Is Matt talking about himself here, because this is the very first post on education I’ve seen from him that promotes any kind of education reform that was not tailor made to “antagonize teacher’s unions.” Anyway, thanks for this, Matt. Finally a post on education that is not about twiddling with teacher compensation.
It is no surprise whatsoever that you would see much greater impact on test scores (and student performance in general) from improved student nutrition than from bizarre behavior modification experiments focused on teachers.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
@62: Jeffery, this experiment has been ongoing for decades in America’s inner city schools.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Since ‘liberal’ is really just a code word for ‘moderate’, let me chime in here and say for the Nth time that I don’t know any teachers liberal or otherwise who think that standardized test scores are illegitimate. We tend to think scoring performance both accurately and precisely as being difficult and time consuming. I have kids who do well on various math tests who don’t really know anything (think fraternities and test banks), and also kids who do poorly but are actually quite good at math(think of kids taking tests at 8:00 am who have to work the 4-11 pm shift and who don’t write particularly fast). I can sort them out on a one-on-one basis pretty accurately, but then you have a situation of one full-time person evaluating maybe 12 kids a day, absolute tops. No one seems to want to go to that sort of trouble; they instead – as many people have already alluded to – want to administer cheap standardized tests, and then push the results of those tests past all reasonable bounds of applicability.
And really, given that this situation pertains to just about every other walk of life, why would anyone expect the schools to be different? Incompetent people get outstanding reviews, competent ones get mediocre or poor reviews all the time.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Notice, btw, that this is something that is not under the teacher’s control. More importantly, this is something that should be parent’s responsibility.
What, you mean those multitudes of studies that show the top predictors of academic performance are all about the parents might actually have a germ of truth to them!?!?!?!
Whadda surprise.
November 12th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
@64
Yes, it has. You’d think they’d have enough data.
November 12th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
[...] is common sense, of course, but this study may add momentum to school lunch reform efforts. (Via Yglesias and Ball.) Link. Spread the [...]