When children arrive at school without breakfast, being the dismal economist I am, the question I ask is not why they didn’t have breakfast – I ask whether their parents had breakfast.
If these children are getting a free breakfast because their parents are too poor to buy them breakfast food, why aren’t their parents invited to school to have a free breakfast as well. How do these parents eat at all? Any good parent would give up their breakfast for their children.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Mary Zaki in their just released Expanding the School Breakfast Program: Impacts on Children’s Consumption, Nutrition and Health look at the school lunch program is nearly universally available in U.S. public schools.
They use experimental data collected by the US Department of Agriculture to measure the impact of two policy innovations aimed at increasing access to the school breakfast program.
The first, universal free school breakfast, provides a hot breakfast before school (typically served in the school’s cafeteria) to all students regardless of their income eligibility for free or reduced-price meals.
The second is the Breakfast in the Classroom program that provides free school breakfast to all children to be eaten in the classroom during the first few minutes of the school day.
The study grouped schools into treated groups (school decided between breakfast in class and cafeteria-based) and control (had normal meal tested before school breakfast which serves free or reduced-price (maximum price of 30 cents) breakfast to those that are income-eligible and can be purchased at full price for those ineligible for a meal subsidy).
The study showed that breakfast in the classroom substantially increased participation in the school breakfast program and the likelihood a child eats a high-quality breakfast. However, there was no evidence for positive impacts on other outcomes, including: overall dietary quality, health, attendance rates, and test scores.
Both policies increase the take-up rate of school breakfast, though much of this reflects shifting breakfast consumption from home to school or the consumption of multiple breakfasts and relatively little of the increase is from students gaining access to breakfast.
Eating in breakfast at home when I was kid was a good chance to talk to my mum and dad and brothers and sisters, but I wasn’t much of a morning person, so I might be understating the benefits of having breakfast at home. I was always running late, so I would always say to mum on the way out to the car to go to school
Feed the cat
.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Dec 10, 2014 @ 21:01:11
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