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What are the benefits of free school meals? Here's what the research says.

Despite being a highly developed nation, the U.S. is experiencing a rise in children experiencing poverty and hunger — a rise that could be reduced by ensuring that every student receives free meals at school, experts say.

A recent report from the Census Bureau reveals that the child poverty rate skyrocketed from  5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022 . One catalyst for this shift was the expiration of the  enhanced version of the child tax credit program , which offered parents a yearly tax credit (and some much-needed financial relief) to help offset strains like  rising unemployment at the start of the pandemic . The temporary pandemic-era Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)  benefits , which millions of families were relying on, also  expired  this year, while federal school meal waivers ended in 2022.

Activists say that losing these resources has undermined the progress made toward helping families in need.

“ Last year’s annual report  saw a record decrease in child poverty because of these expansions,” says Teddy Waszazak, the universal school meals campaign manager at  Hunger Free Vermont . “[It] shows just how important and effective programs like the child tax credit, universal school meals and SNAP are in reducing poverty and hunger.”

Stripped of these crucial supports, many parents are struggling to feed their families and depend on free school meals for their children. So why is the concept of  universal free school meals  still so controversial?

What the research says about school-provided meals

Better health and more food security:  A 2023  study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics  found that children who received onsite meals and snacks provided by their child care center had higher chances of being food-secure, were more likely to be in good health and had lower odds of being admitted to a hospital from an emergency department than those eating meals and snacks from home.

Improved performance at school:  A 2021  report from the Brookings Institution  analyzed the impact of a program that offered schoolwide free meals and found an improvement in math performance (particularly among elementary and Hispanic students) at school districts where few previously qualified for free meals. Researchers also saw a significant reduction in suspensions among certain students.

Improved test scores and no negative impacts on weight or BMI:  A  report from the Center for Policy Research at the Maxwell School  reinforces the findings that  universal free meals have a positive effect  on the English language arts and math test scores of all students. Researchers also found no evidence that universal free meals cause any increase in student weight or body mass index.

What support for free school lunch looks like

In 2021,  California  and  Maine  became the first two states to  pass legislation for universal free lunches  at public schools. This school year, six others joined them: Minnesota,  New Mexico , Colorado, Vermont,  Michigan  and  Massachusetts . But it doesn’t end there.

“Right now, we know at least 25 states have either formed coalitions or introduced legislation for free school meals,” says Waszazak, noting that both  Connecticut  and  Nevada  are working to extend their school meal programs. Illinois, meanwhile, passed legislation to provide free school meals, though there’s been  concern over how schools can provide those meals  without additional funding.

And in other areas, like at Broward County Public Schools in South Florida, there are  ongoing pilot programs  making sure students don’t go hungry.

“Universal free breakfast has been in place since 2014. It was successful right away, and it increased the number of kids that ate breakfast with us,” says registered dietitian Casie Maggio, program manager for nutrition education and training at Broward County Public Schools, the sixth-largest district in the nation. This year they’ve adopted a universal lunch pilot program, and she says they’re already seeing more students enjoying school lunches.

Why it matters

Experts say that providing free school meals is vital not only from a financial perspective, but from a health standpoint too.

“There have been numerous studies that have concluded that students perform better academically, behaviorally and emotionally after consuming nutritious meals during the school day. We see this in our schools every day,” Maggio tells Yahoo Life.

“The lack of consistent access to adequate quantity and quality food for a healthy, active life has been shown to increase risks for iron deficiency anemia, asthma, tooth decay, stunted growth and overweight due to intake of high-calorie foods that are low in vitamins and minerals,” says  Krystal Hodge , an assistant professor in food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Hodge says hunger keeps students from being able to focus on learning.

“In a study of 500 low-income parents and their children ages 13 to 18 conducted by  No Kid Hungry in 2017 , 59% of the children surveyed reported coming to school hungry,” says Hodge. “Research has shown that students at nutritional risk are more likely to skip breakfast, and have poor attendance, to be late [and] to show behavioral problems in school.”

Hodge says a big challenge that remains is that many families who aren’t eligible for income-based assistance still need help obtaining food, including school lunch.

“Offering universal free school meals reduces financial and social barriers to participation, including the stigma associated with receiving free meals that can be negative, even at this age,” she notes.

So what does it take to ensure all schoolchildren are fed?

Every school district and every state has a different process to go through to pass universal school meals, but persistence, collaboration with other vested interests and a vast well of research and data seem to be the most important factors.

“It took four years for the Vermont legislature to pass a permanent universal school meals bill. But Hunger Free Vermont, the School Nutrition Association of Vermont and the Vermont Farm to School Network had been collaborating for a decade before that to lay the groundwork for this effort,” says Waszazak. That groundwork included research and data-gathering to prove that universal meals reduce child hunger while yielding better outcomes for students and even improving local farm economies.

Although a bill was introduced just before the pandemic, state-level advocacy in Vermont slowed down when the federal government stepped in to fund universal meals for all students across the nation. Vermont activists were able to extend the universal school meals program for another year to gather data about the positive impact on students and the state as a whole, which later helped convince the legislature to pass the now permanent program.

Waszazak says the most prevalent criticism of the program is that it provides free meals to affluent families who can afford to pay. He disagrees for a number of reasons, including that universal school meals are one key piece of education equity.

“We do not ‘means’ test for students to have access to [other school resources], nor should we for school meals,” he says.

What can parents do?

To the parents, educators and activists who are hoping to bring universal school meals to other areas, Waszazak says: “Organize and build coalitions! It was much more than a student issue — we engaged teachers, school nutrition professionals, school boards, principals and superintendents, farmers, pediatricians, parents and more. This allowed us to build a campaign that was rural and urban, in schools and out, and tri-partisan.”

Parents who don’t qualify for free or reduced lunch  are still encouraged to apply , as this helps determine how much funding schools receive and how many meals they can subsidize. Those who can afford to do so can also  help wipe out school lunch debt .

Hodge recommends parents write letters to their school’s superintendents and congressional representatives. She adds, “If there is an opportunity to be part of your school’s wellness committee, this is a great opportunity to allow your voice to be heard.”

It’s for our common good: School meals should be free for all students

In 2020, the federal government initiated an unprecedented experiment to feed every schoolchild in the United States, in response to the explosion of need brought on by the absence of a social safety net at the onset of the Covid pandemic. After declining in 2021, food insecurity rose for U.S. households in 2022 to levels equivalent to the earliest days of the pandemic. Despite this reversal, Congress allowed the program to expire on June 30, 2022, even as food prices had increased by more than 10 percent over the previous 12 months.

With 12 million American children struggling with hunger, educators and other student advocates warn that going back to the pre-pandemic norm is untenable. A recent School Nutrition Association  survey found nearly all school nutrition directors were concerned for the solvency of their programs. So once it became clear that Congress would abandon the measure, advocates  across the country began creating state-level models. But the federal government needs to step up to establish a minimal standard of care for all children. And Catholics should support universal free school meals both because it aids the poor and because it promotes the common good.

With 12 million American children struggling with hunger, educators and other student advocates warn that going back to the pre-pandemic norm is untenable.

Moral arguments aside, a 2021 review of 47 studies on the impact of free school meals makes it clear this is good public policy. Most found that universal free lunch programs boosted overall diet quality, food security and academic performance. Researchers also found that free school meals may be associated with a boost in household income among low-income families.

Currently, the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, which provide free and reduced-cost meals to schoolchildren, are means-tested. That means school meals are free for a family of four with a gross annual income below $36,075, and discounted for families of four earning less than $51,338. But a household of four attempting to buy eggs, pay rent, and by some miracle find adequate child care is poor even with an annual income well above $51,338.

One might reasonably wonder if the solution to food insecurity is to simply expand eligibility for these programs rather than universalize them. But universal benefits are more efficient as they lower administrative costs for school districts (which no longer have to determine eligibility for free lunch programs), and they remove hoops that the poor have to jump through. These administrative costs often make means-tested programs  more expensive than universal ones. And universal free school meals do not prevent affluent parents from packing meals or extra goodies for their children. It does, however, enforce a minimum standard of care for all children, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Universal benefits are more efficient as they lower administrative costs for school districts, and they remove hoops that the poor have to jump through.

Dividing most Americans into the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor obscures an undeniable fact about the life of the American working class as a whole: We are not O.K. Half of American workers made less than $35,000 in 2019, and most of us are struggling to make ends meet. Feeding America, a national network of food banks, reported last year that 53 million people sought help from food banks, pantries and other programs in 2021, up by one-third from pre-pandemic levels. Working-class millennials and Generation Xers, who by now have lived or worked though two national economic emergencies in 25 years, are familiar with this shared vulnerability.

Finally, an understatement: Moms are tired. An important contributing factor is the persistence of an unequal distribution of domestic labor by gender. American norms around domestic labor have not caught up to the reality that just before the “she-session” brought on by the lack of protections geared toward female workers in the first years of the pandemic, women accounted for a  slight majority of the American workforce. Despite this, a Gallup survey from 2020 found that 59 percent of women reported they are likely to have greater child care responsibilities than their partners, and in a Pew Research Center survey from 2021, the same percentage of women said they were burdened with a greater share of household chores, with 74 percent saying they had more responsibility for managing their children’s schedule and activities.

Moms are tired. An important contributing factor is the persistence of an unequal distribution of domestic labor by gender.

According to a  January 2020 study by Oxfam’s Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women in the United States spend an average 5.7 hours per day maintaining the household, more than two hours above the average for men. That difference is the equivalent of two more workdays per week! Notably, wealth did not protect women from this disparity; it only lessened it.

This tax on women’s time, health and capacity to devote their efforts elsewhere is a social problem that cannot be solved household by household. Social problems demand social solutions that match the proportion of their harm.

Our collective investment in the common good permits us to live fuller lives and contribute to society. I don’t have to exhaust myself blazing a fresh trail to the office every morning thanks to our shared investment in roads. We can also expand the individual capacities of mothers by making collective contributions to this basic need of all children.

At the  signing ceremony for the National School Lunch Act of 1946, the legislation that created the National School Lunch Program, President Harry S. Truman began his remarks by situating it within a set of shared interests common to all Americans: “Today, as I sign the National School Lunch Act, I feel that the Congress has acted with great wisdom in providing the basis for strengthening the nation through better nutrition for our school children.” The National School Lunch Act, as its proponents saw it in 1946, promoted the common good.

Every president claims that his legislative priorities are in the national interest. But in Mr. Truman’s case, this was more than convenient framing. Malnutrition was a major reason the Selective Service rejected millions of draftees during  World War II . This was a costly lesson in the depths and consequences of our shared interests. To advance the common good today, free school breakfast and lunch programs need to be universalized. Catholics interested in promoting this core tenet of our social teaching should support state-level efforts as a stopgap, but they should also pressure their federal legislators to make school meals a universal public benefit.

[Read next: “ What can bring together pro-life Republicans and progressive Democrats? Expanding the child tax credit .”]

Dwayne David Paul is a Catholic educator and writer based in Connecticut.

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Should school lunches be free for all? A pandemic experiment.

• Deep Read ( 5 Min. )
• By Nick Roll Staff writer

April 7, 2021 | SPRINGFIELD TOWNSHIP, OHIO

Ever since March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, schools across the United States have been ground zero in a massive, accidental experiment in universal free meals. All public school children are for the first time experiencing equal access to food, no questions asked.

But the idea of providing universal free meals requires a certain shift in thought – and budgets – that not everyone agrees with.

Why We Wrote This

Long involved in fighting childhood hunger, public schools are providing free meals this year – regardless of family income. The unplanned experiment offers clues about what works. Third in a series about hunger in America.

“The National School Lunch Program was created to provide meals for children from low-income families, period,” says Jonathan Butcher, who researches education policy at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. While opening up eligibility during the pandemic might make sense, previous expansions – and the prospect of making the current one permanent – have resulted in programs straying from their origins and providing meals to people who don’t want or need them, he says.

By contrast, universal free meals make perfect sense to Hattie Johnson, director of nutrition services for Monroe County Community School Corporation in Bloomington, Indiana. “If we’re supposed to treat all kids the same, if public education is supposed to be free, and we know that the kids can’t make it through the school day without having something to eat, then why isn’t it a part of a free education?”

It’s 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, and Cathy McNair and a few student volunteers are ready to go. They’ve wheeled out a couple dozen boxes of pre-packaged meals – some donated and some from the school’s food services provider – to the Finneytown Secondary Campus parking lot in suburban Cincinnati.

High school and middle school students here are attending class on a hybrid model – partially in person, partially remote. But students need to eat regardless, so the questions arise: If they’re not getting their meals at school, how are they getting them? Are they getting them?

Ms. McNair, the school social worker, and her team set up shop multiple times a week to hand out free school meals to anyone who wants them. Parents pull up, drive-thru style, to maintain social distancing. 

“I love it. I absolutely love it,” says Christina, a mother of four, who asks that her last name be withheld in order to feel comfortable talking about her family’s financial situation. Without the meals, she says, “it would be a lot more stressful. A lot more of me monitoring – ‘Alright, you can have this much milk today.’”

Despite myriad programs – free and reduced-price school breakfasts, lunches, and after-school meals, as well as benefits like SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) – 11 million children in the United States lived in “food insecure” homes before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the advocacy group No Kid Hungry. Amid predictions that number could reach 18 million during the pandemic, restrictions on how poor a family had to be to qualify for free school meals were lifted – opening up the program to all.

Since March 2020, schools across the country have been ground zero in a massive, accidental experiment in universal free meals. 

The results aren’t perfect, advocates say, but it’s opened up new ground in a debate on how to make sure each American child has enough to eat every day. 

As a result of the expansion of the meal programs, advocates say, working poor people can now get the help they need, and families don’t feel singled out for receiving free meals. After more than a year under this temporary system, some are seeing a new, permanent path emerging for universal free school meals.

Others see a new entitlement creeping up in place of a targeted poverty-reduction program and want to return to the previous system if the expansion expires in September as planned. In the meantime, all public school children – in one of the world’s wealthiest nations – are for the first time experiencing equal access to food, no questions asked.

“Personally, I think it would be great if we had food, and if kids wanted food, they got food,” says Ms. McNair. At the Tuesday meal distribution, she spots a student leaving an extracurricular activity and asks if he wants a meal. He hesitates at first, but takes one. Without missing a beat, Ms. McNair asks him, “Just one? Do you have siblings at home?”

Stigma-free food or undue entitlement?

In a normal year, free or reduced-price school meals were a lifeline for students from low-income families. Schools – or the companies they contract with to provide food – could get reimbursed by the federal government for the free and reduced-price meals they offered. But there was a strict income threshold for eligibility.

For Christina and her family, who have depended on free school lunches off and on over the years, lifting the eligibility requirements also lifted a huge mental burden as she and her husband faced unemployment and underemployment amid the pandemic’s devastating economic toll. 

“There’s a stigma behind a free lunch,” says Christina, picking up her meals at the Finneytown Secondary Campus. “Some kids are embarrassed that they’re on that free lunch. And so, with everybody having it, there’s not that stigma behind it.”

Her family certainly isn’t alone.

The pre-pandemic eligibility rules inevitably meant some students weren’t getting the assistance they needed. Gerry Levy, nutrition services director for several Cincinnati-area school districts, rattles off examples: children of working poor people who made just a bit too much money to be eligible, those who can’t read English and didn’t turn in the forms, and those who were too embarrassed to ask for help. For Ms. Levy, the expansion has been “ideal.”

But the idea of providing universal free meals requires a certain shift in thought – and budgets – that not everyone agrees with. One Indianapolis-area public school contacted by the Monitor, for example, was hesitant to comment on its meal expansions. The administrator voiced concerns over how members of the community, located in a politically conservative area, would react to the fact that people who didn’t need free meals might be getting them.

“The National School Lunch Program was created to provide meals for children from low-income families, period,” says Jonathan Butcher, who researches education policy at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. While opening up eligibility during the pandemic might make sense, previous expansions – and the prospect of making the current one permanent – have resulted in programs straying from their origins and providing meals to people who don’t want or need them, he says. 

When it comes to shoring up the previous system, “let’s make a program that is going to help those in need as effectively as possible,” Mr. Butcher says. “Making school meals universal creates an entitlement – it essentially gives up on the idea that we should be concerned about accuracy.”

“All of a sudden we can afford it”

Hattie Johnson, director of nutrition services for Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) in Bloomington, Indiana, knows something about crunching numbers.

Before the pandemic, during the 2019-20 school year, Ms. Johnson’s school system was on track to rack up nearly $100,000 in school lunch debt, accrued from students not paying for their lunches. 

When students pass through the lunch line without any cash, schools usually serve them anyway and document the money the family needs to pay back. When it’s a kid who forgot her lunch money, that’s no big deal. When it’s a family struggling to make ends meet – but ineligible for free meals – schools are stuck chasing after money from people who don’t have it. In recent years, the MCCSC has turned to a local charitable foundation and the federal government to help reconcile the negative balance.

But this past school year brought a completely unexpected test: Can the nation actually afford to offer free school lunch? Ever since March 2020, MCCSC has done just that, and its school lunch debt problem has essentially disappeared. 

“I’ve been in school meals since 1993. And when I came in ... the big push was universal feeding” – that is, free school meals for all, regardless of income, says Ms. Johnson. “For a gazillion years, [the United States Department of Agriculture] would say we cannot afford it. Then, COVID. And all of a sudden we can afford it.”

This spring, there aren’t as many free meals being served as Ms. Johnson would have expected – children have returned to classrooms, but some families are still remote, and not all are picking up meals. Others are packing lunch, out of COVID-19 concerns. But the results of this year’s experiment in universal free meals are clear – at least to her.

“If we’re supposed to treat all kids the same, if public education is supposed to be free, and we know that the kids can’t make it through the school day without having something to eat, then why isn’t it a part of a free education?”

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Top 10 Reasons to Support Free Healthy School Meals for All

April 8, 2021

In this guest blog post, Dr. Janet Poppendieck, Urban School Food Alliance Advisory Council Member, highlights 10 key reasons to support free healthy school meals for all . Professor Poppendieck is the author of Free For All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010).

• Reduce childhood hunger and food insecurity. An alarming increase in food insecurity among children has been reported during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthy school meals should be available to all students, including those who may be in need but are not financially eligible under the current rules. — a common occurrence in parts of the nation where the cost of living is high. Providing free meals to all eliminates the inaccuracies in application and certification that have resulted in some eligible children being denied free or reduced-price meals, and it encourages participation.
• End s chool food stigma. When school meals are perceived as “welfare food,” or “poor kids’ meals,” some students in need decline to participate, preferring to go hungry, and those who do participate consume a meal tainted by shame. The stigma derived from the income-based classification of students quickly transfers to the food itself, leading to perceptions that it is inferior, even when the items served are the very same ones that students are purchasing from the corner store.
• Terminate “lunch shaming . ” Ironically, efforts to reduce the stigma associated with free and reduced-price meals have created a new type of shaming. As school systems have converted to electronic systems using swipe cards or finger imaging to mask the distinction between the children who are paying the school meals fees and those who are not, the problem of “low balance” or unpaid lunch bills has led to public shaming of students in efforts to collect money from parents. Some schools stamp children’s hands with a message to parents: “I need lunch money.” Some take trays away from children when they reach the cashier, giving students an inexpensive replacement meal widely known as a “stigma sandwich.”
• Eliminate lunch debt. Meanwhile, unpaid lunch bills total hundreds of thousands of dollars annually that must be written off by school food operators, reducing the resources available for food, staff, and equipment and thus the quality of the meals offered. Further, owing lunch money deters parents from participating in school activities such as parent-teacher conferences and exhibit nights.
• Remove a significant administrative burden. Distributing and collecting applications for free and reduced-price meals, certifying students for the proper school meals fee categories based on parental income, verifying a subset of applications to comply with federal requirements, and assigning and reporting each meal served to the correct reimbursement category are complex processes that absorbs the time of principals and teachers as well as school food service staff, time that could be better spent on education.
• Improve the meals. As participation increases, the unit cost of producing each meal goes down. By removing barriers to participation and eliminating unpaid meal debt,      healthy school meals for all will increase the resources available for food and labor, resulting in better, fresher, more appealing food — and thus further increasing participation. As more students participate, more parents and students will have a reason to get involved in efforts to improve menus and meal quality.
• Speed up the lines, giv e students more time to eat. Studies show that when students are pressed for time to eat, they reach for sweets and carbohydrates first, and often forgo the healthiest foods on their plates. With everyone entitled to meals, schools can experiment with innovative approaches to the lunch hour such as serving meals during club meetings and specialized activities.
• Promote student health. School meals are designed to meet nutrition standards and promote healthy eating . In a nation in which diet-related diseases are rampant, food education is widely recognized as a crucial contributor to health. A school in which all students are invited to the table can improve student health outcomes in the present through healthy meals, and in the future by integrating school food with the curriculum.
• Enhance learning and academic achievement. Students who eat do better than students who miss meals. Students who consume healthy foods do better than students who pick up a bag of chips and a soda at the corner store. Students in schools with      healthy meals for all fared better on tests than their peers in schools without universal in a carefully controlled study by the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.
• Foster social solidarity, reduce bullying, promote cohesion. Think of meals at summer camp — a time for relaxation, socialization, and joy. Once the stigma of the association with poverty is removed, school lunchrooms can become the hospitable places that they were always intended to be.

  Urge your Members of Congress to support free healthy school meals for all today.

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The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a vital tool for public health, helping families supplement their budgets to put food on the table. A new Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) research brief underscores the ways that consumer choice in SNAP enhances dignity and equity in the program and entrusts families to make decisions about their health.

This month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a final rule revising the WIC food package. The rule includes important updates that will enhance equitable access to nutritious food, improve the nutritional quality of the foods offered, and make WIC more participant-centered. These changes will contribute to longstanding positive impacts on program participation, health outcomes for WIC participants, and efforts to address health disparities.

Given the increased need, the 2024 Maryland legislative session presented crucial opportunities to strengthen and expand hunger programs at the state level. Maryland has a particularly short session, compared to other states with only 90 days from early January to early April. The 500+ bills that passed this year are currently being signed into law by Gov. Wes Moore. The two key priorities for Maryland Hunger Solutions this year were: (1) increasing the Maryland SNAP minimum benefit to $95 per month, and (2) implementing universal school meals in Maryland. Unfortunately, anti-hunger advocates in Maryland faced an uphill battle in passing any significant legislation in light of a grim state budget outlook. Advocates made the case that, even in tough budget years, it is important to make investments in anti-hunger programs that provide resources to our most vulnerable residents and lead to long-term positive economic impacts, improved educational outcomes, and health care cost savings.

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Offering free lunches for all students: Financial impacts on schools, families and grocery stores

As lawmakers discuss the pros and cons of schools offering free lunches and breakfasts to all students, regardless of income, it's important to know what the research says about the financial impacts.

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Anti-hunger and child advocates have pressed state and federal legislators for years to allow all students, regardless of household income, to eat free lunches and breakfasts at school.

But the national call for universal free school meals has grown louder and more widespread amid news reports about school cafeteria workers shaming children with unpaid lunch debt and a growing body of research demonstrating the benefits of eating school meals , which must meet federal nutrition standards .

For 70-plus years, kids from lower-income families have been able to apply for and receive free or reduced-price meals under the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act , which President Harry Truman signed in 1946.

In 2014, the federal government increased the number of children receiving free meals by allowing schools in high-poverty areas nationwide to provide breakfast and lunch to their entire student population at no charge.

The option became available under the Community Eligibility Provision , a part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 that was phased in over several years. Schools can serve all students free lunches and breakfasts if more than 40% of their students have been identified as low income, homeless or being in foster care.

During the 2019-20 academic year, 26 million students — 52% of public school enrollment — were eligible for free or reduced-price meals, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers various child nutrition programs, waived eligibility requirements for free school meals, allowing schools to serve meals to all students at no cost. But the option to provide free meals during the regular academic year expired at the end of June.

On June 25, President Joe Biden signed the Keep Kids Fed Act of 2022 , which, among other things, gave kids access to free food over the summer.

Schools in California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada and Vermont will continue providing universal free school meals because lawmakers in those states decided to pick up the tab for expenses the federal government will no longer cover. Colorado might join them. In November, Colorado residents will vote on Proposition FF , which would establish a program allowing students statewide to eat for free at public schools.

As elected leaders in other parts of the U.S. consider adopting universal free meal programs, a key question they will likely ask is how the change will impact people’s pocketbooks. It’s important for journalists to know what the research says about the financial consequences for school districts, local businesses and households with and without children.

Below, we’ve gathered and summarized several academic studies published in recent years that investigate these issues. We plan to add new research as it becomes available.

For additional context, you may find it helpful to read a recent analysis examining universal free school meal programs’ effects on youth in areas such as academic achievement, health and school attendance. The paper, “ Universal School Meals and Associations with Student Participation, Attendance, Academic Performance, Diet Quality, Food Security, and Body Mass Index: A Systematic Review ,” synthesizes the results of 47 studies conducted in the U.S. and other countries.

For more background, check out our roundup of research, “ School Meals: Healthy Lunches, Food Waste and Effects on Learning .” One of the studies we included suggests kids might eat more of the fruits and vegetables served with school lunches if lunch were scheduled after recess.

The National Center for Education Statistics is a good resource for data on the number and percentage of U.S. students eligible for free and reduced-price meals. There’s substantial variation by state. In New Hampshire and Delaware, fewer than 30% of kids qualified in 2019-20 compared with more than 70% in Mississippi, New Mexico and the District of Columbia.

Free lunches and breakfasts: Impacts on local businesses and households

The Effect of Free School Meals on Household Food Purchases: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision Michelle Marcus and Katherine G. Yewell. Journal of Health Economics, July 2022.

When schools provide free lunches and breakfasts to all kids on campus, area households spend less money on groceries and lower-income families buy more nutritious food, this study indicates.

Food purchases decline by an estimated $11 per month, on average, among households with children located in the same zip code as the school offering universal free meals — regardless of whether those children attend that school, according to the analysis, conducted by Michelle Marcus , an assistant professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, and Katie Yewell , an assistant professor in the University of Louisville’s department of health management and systems sciences.

When Marcus and Yewell looked specifically at households with children who likely attend the school offering free meals, they found those families’ food expenditures fall as much as $39 a month, on average.

The researchers used data from the Food Research & Action Center and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to identify U.S. schools that participated in the Community Eligibility Provision program after it s implementation nationally in 2014. To better understand how much money different households spend on food and what they buy, Marcus and Yewell examined data from the Nielsen Consumer Panel Dataset , which includes a variety of information collected annually from a panel of 40,000 to 60,000 U.S. households. The researchers looked at data gathered from 2004 to 2016.

Another key takeaway: The researchers learned that when a school introduces a universal free meals program, lower-income households with children located in the same zip code buy healthier foods. Marcus and Yewell write that they found “suggestive evidence of an improvement in their overall dietary quality by about 3 percent.”

The researchers did not investigate the causes of these food shopping changes. They suggest households that benefit directly from free school meal programs probably spend less money on breakfast and lunch foods.

They also discovered that offering universal free meals encourages more lower-income students to eat school meals. Not all kids who qualify for free food based on household income will participate in the National School Lunch Program. But a larger percentage of children who qualify for free meals based on income will eat free school meals when they’re offered to all students.

This indicates “the stigma of free school meals may be declining after universal access,” Marcus and Yewell write.

School Food Policy Affects Everyone: Retail Responses to the National School Lunch Program Jessie Handbury and Sarah Moshary. National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2021.

When schools offer free lunches and breakfasts under the federal Community Eligibility Provision, it “causes households with children to reduce their grocery purchases, leading to a 10% decline in grocery sales at large retail chains,” this working paper finds. Grocery stores respond by cutting prices.

“A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the annual direct benefit of the [National School Lunch Program] for a household with children amounts to a 25% reduction in shopping costs,” write the authors, Jessie Handbury , an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Moshary , an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The two researchers studied the effects of schools offering free lunches and breakfasts to all students by examining three sets of data. The National Center for Education Statistics provided data on U.S. schools that offered free meals under the Community Eligibility Provision from 2013 to 2016. The Nielsen Company’s Homescan project provided data on household food purchases from 2011 to 2016. The researchers also examined grocery prices and sales from 2011 to 2016, obtained from Nielsen’s Scantrack , which tracks data on weekly sales of individual products for more than 20,000 grocery stores nationwide.

Handbury and Moshary find that after a school introduces universal free meals, “households with school-aged children take fewer trips to and spend less money at grocery stores, especially large retail chains.”

Their analysis also suggests “stores near schools that are all eligible for the [Community Eligibility Provision] earn 2.9% lower revenues than those neighboring ineligible schools,” the authors write. “Estimates are larger in magnitude if we focus on the sales of lunch meats.”

Handbury and Moshary learned that individual chain grocery stores do not reduce prices in response to a local school introducing a free-meals-for-all program. Rather, retail chains adjust prices across stores as a response to multiple schools providing universal free meals in communities their chain stores serve.

“Consequently, some consumers enjoy lower prices even when their local school does not adopt the program,” the authors write.

How school spending, finances are affected

Universal Free Meals Associated with Lower Meal Costs While Maintaining Nutritional Quality Michael W. Long, Keith Marple and Tatiana Andreyeva. Nutrients, February 2021.

The per-student cost of school meals dropped at large and medium-sized schools in the U.S. after they launched universal free meal programs, according to this study, which also finds the dietary quality of their school meals did not change.

At large and medium-sized schools serving 500 students or more, the full cost of providing free breakfasts to all students was $2.92 per child, on average. Large and medium-sized schools that did not participate in the program spent an average of $3.49 per pupil.

Lunch costs also fell. The full cost of providing lunches was $4.83 for each student at medium and large schools after they started feeding all kids on campus. Similarly sized schools that did not offer universal free lunches spent $5.50 per student, find the researchers, Michael W. Long ,  an assistant professor in the George Washington University Department of Prevention and Community Health; Keith Marple of Brandeis University; and Tatiana Andreyeva , director of economic initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut.

The paper’s authors write that they had expected per-student costs to drop at medium and large schools due to economies of scale achieved by feeding larger numbers of children.

To measure potential changes in meal costs and dietary quality, the authors examined data from the School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study , a national study of school meal programs conducted for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition Service during the 2014-15 academic year.

The authors focused on the 508 schools eligible to offer universal free meals based on their percentage of students who qualified, based on household income, for free and reduce-priced meals. Of those 508 schools, 103 provided universal free meals.

The researchers discovered that per-student meal costs rose at small schools, or those with fewer than 500 students, after implementing a universal free meal program. Small schools offering breakfast to all kids on campus spent $4.03 per child, on average, compared with $3.85 per child at schools that did not participate in the program.

Per-pupil lunch costs remained the same at $6.30.

The authors write that in 2014-15, the first year the Community Eligibility Provision became available nationally, it appears “the economy of scale was not yet available for CEP participating small schools.”

When they analyzed data about the dietary quality of school meals, they learned it did not change after schools implemented universal free meals, despite reductions in per-meal costs for medium and large schools.

Paying for Free Lunch: The Impact of CEP Universal Free Meals on Revenues, Spending, and Student Health Michah W. Rothbart, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Emily Gutierrez. Education Finance and Policy, May 2022.

The financial impact of providing free lunches for all students differs for urban and rural schools in New York, researchers conclude. Rural schools statewide tended to lose money when they implemented universal free meal programs prior to the pandemic. Meanwhile, schools in more heavily populated regions did not.

“In fact, [the Community Eligibility Provision program] increases the size of school food program deficits in rural districts by $30 per pupil,” write the researchers, Michah W. Rothbart and Amy Ellen Schwartz of Syracuse University and Emily Gutierrez of the Center on Education Data and Policy at The Urban Institute. “Conversely, CEP helps close school food program deficits in metro and town districts.”

Rural schools are more likely to face other financial hurdles. Before expanding their free meal programs, many would need to expand the size of their cafeterias and hire additional staff.

To better understand the financial impacts of universal free meal programs, the researchers analyzed a variety of data, including school revenues and expenditures and school meal participation rates, for 698 New York school districts from 2010 to 2017.

Rothbart, Schwartz and Gutierrez learned that schools lost local revenue when they started participating in the Community Eligibility Provision program because children received meals for free. And food expenses grew as more kids chose to eat school breakfasts and lunches.

However, federal meal funding also increased for these schools.

“Overall, federal revenues more than compensate for changes in local school food revenues and expenditures, with no effect on instructional expenditures,” the researchers write. “Thus, the ‘price’ of [universal free meals] seems to be largely paid by the federal government, with a notable exception of rural districts.”

‘It’s Just So Much Waste.’ A Qualitative Investigation of Food Waste in a Universal Free School Breakfast Program Stacy A Blondin, Holly Carmichael Djang, Nesly Metayer, Stephanie Anzman-Frasca and Christina D. Economos. Public Health Nutrition, December 2014.

This small study, based on interviews and focus groups, focuses on breakfast food waste at 10 elementary schools in a large, urban school district in the U.S. One of the main takeaways: Students at these schools, all of which offer universal free breakfast, throw out a lot of the milk and fruit they receive each morning.

Some of the potential reasons: Kids often don’t have time to finish their breakfasts. Many dislike some of the foods served — oatmeal bars and plain milk, for example. Also, young children have a tough time eating oranges that have not been peeled.

The paper does not estimate the amount of waste. Rather, it offers a qualitative view of the issue — perceptions of food waste, attitudes toward it and possible explanations for why children throw away so much of their school breakfast.

A team of researchers from Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy conducted interviews and focus groups with a total of 235 people — 86 parents, 44 teachers, 85 students, 10 cafeteria managers and 10 elementary school principals. More than 70% of participating parents, teachers and cafeteria managers were Hispanic.

One teacher, when asked about food waste, “suggested that more than half of [milk] cartons offered were discarded as ‘The number of milks we’ve — I have 20, only 21 students right now. But I would say, on the average, we throw away at least 15 milks a day,’” the researchers write.

A teacher also noted that serving an expired item to one student can be problematic for a whole classroom.

“Foods in such conditions were cited as provoking participant skepticism and mass disposal,” the researchers write. “As one teacher explained: ‘One of the kids will notice, and then everyone looks, and then – they won’t eat it, they’ll throw it away. Even if it’s a day late, they won’t, they’re not eating it.’”

Study participants shared a variety of ideas for reducing food waste, including cutting fruit before serving it and saving unused foods for future consumption.

A cafeteria manager said serving breakfast in class has helped reduce waste at their school. Because students must stay in their classrooms after eating, they don’t rush through breakfast so they can go outside.

“Kids are not throwing their trays away automatically like they did [in the cafeteria], because they want[ed] to go out and play on the yard,” the cafeteria manager told researchers.

About The Author

Denise-Marie Ordway

Free school meals for all children can improve kids’ health

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford University

Disclosure statement

Matthew J. Landry receives funding support from the National Institutes of Health. He is affiliated with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics where he serves as a volunteer member of the Legislative and Public Policy Committee. He is also a member of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior where he serves as an appointed member of the Advisory Committee on Public Policy. These organizations had no role in this article and the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author.

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Recognizing that millions of U.S. children are at risk of hunger , Maine and California have approved funding to offer free school meals to all students within their state. Meanwhile, a bill proposed in Congress aims to make free school meals a permanent fixture in all states.

The Universal School Meals Program Act would provide free healthy meals and snacks to all children in public and nonprofit private schools regardless of income.

Currently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed school districts to provide meals free of charge to families during the pandemic. Previously set to expire in September, the policy has been extended through the 2021-2022 school year . This marks the first time in the 75-year history of the National School Lunch Program that all U.S. public school children are getting equal access to school meals, with no questions asked.

As a registered dietitian nutritionist and researcher who specializes in child food insecurity , I frequently see how access and availability to nutritious foods can shape kids’ health.

When children return to schools in the fall, the ongoing policy waivers provide an opportunity to examine how universal free school meals impact nutrition in school meal programs and health inequities among children.

Better health

Good nutrition plays a crucial role in strong academic outcomes . School meals have been shown to reduce childhood food insecurity and childhood overweight and obesity while improving overall diet quality .

School meals are often more nutritious than meals eaten elsewhere or even home-packed lunches . Studies have shown that access to school meals can improve attendance , academic performance and behavior .

Less stigma

Many children, especially those from low-income and minority families, eat up to half their daily calories at school. For these families, the cost of school meals, usually between US$2.48 and $2.74 depending on grade level, can add up quickly over a week, month or school year.

Children with outstanding meal debts could be shamed , refused a meal or provided a lower-cost alternative meal – such as a cheese sandwich, fruit and milk rather than the standard meal served to other students.

Needed relief

School meal programs are run like a business and depend heavily on federal reimbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When families can’t or don’t pay for meals served, schools may need to use their own funds to cover the losses. The Department of Agriculture prohibits using federal funds to pay off unpaid meal debt. The Universal School Meals Program Act would eliminate around $10.9 million of existing unpaid school meal debt reported by 75% of U.S. school districts .

In addition to school meal debt, during the first full year of the pandemic, schools served fewer meals , resulting in further losses in revenue. The meals served were more costly due to packaging and personal protective equipment for staff. As a result, more than 50% of school meal programs reported a financial loss in 2019-2020. An even greater number of programs report expecting a loss for the 2020-2021 school year .

Return on investment

A national study found that schools participating in universal free meal programs reduced their per-meal costs while maintaining nutritional quality of meals served. School meals can stimulate local economies because they can drive purchases from local farmers and ranchers and create jobs in school nutrition, food production, sales and distribution.

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For school districts, switching to a universal model of meals for all children – regardless of income – is likely to reduce administrative burdens . Schools would no longer have to waste time on applications and meeting reporting requirements like they have to do under the current reimbursement model. They could focus on healthy meals and nutrition education instead.

I believe the return on investment from universal school lunches would benefit our country’s economic recovery from the pandemic as well as the health and well-being of our country’s children.

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Why School Meals Matter

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years. Weight statistics for children are approaching that of adults: 1 in 3 children is now overweight or obese. Studies have also shown a rising prevalence of type 1 and 2 diabetes in adolescents ages 10 through 19 years, with increasing obesity cited as a key contributor. [1]

On a positive note, the CDC showed a significant 40% decline in obesity rates from 2003 to 2012 in younger children ages 2 to 5 years. [2] Another CDC report revealed a decline in obesity rates among low-income children ages 2 to 4 years participating in federal nutrition programs. [3] Authors from both studies discussed the likely impact of early education programs focusing on improved nutrition and exercise standards, as guided by the HHFKA.

Despite some anecdotal reports in the media that fruits and vegetables from these new updated school meals were ending up in the trash, two studies discovered the opposite. In 2014, Cohen at al. found that children were eating more of their entrees and selecting and eating more fruit. [4] In 2015, Schwartz et al. followed more than 500 children in urban schools in grades 5 through 7, comparing before and after pictures and weights of their school lunches. [5] They found that after two years there was a 19% increase in vegetable intake. Though the amount of fruit eaten did not change, 12% more children were selecting fruits as part of their lunch tray. The authors noted that a greater variety of fruits had been made available, which may have encouraged the children to choose fruit.

Healthier choices throughout the school day

According to standards that went into effect in 2016, a Smart Snack must be one of the following:

• A grain product that contains 50 percent or more whole grains by weight (i.e., lists a whole grain as the first ingredient)
• Have as the first ingredient a fruit, a vegetable, a dairy product, or a protein food
• A combination food that contains at least ¼ cup of fruit and/or vegetable

The snack must also meet specific  nutrient standards for calories, sodium, sugar, and fats per serving.

When it comes to drinks, allowed beverages include the following:

• Plain water (with or without carbonation)
• Unflavored low fat milk
• Unflavored or flavored fat-free milk and milk alternatives
• 100% fruit or vegetable juice
• Calorie-free, flavored water (with or without carbonation)
• Flavored and/or carbonated beverages that contain less than 5 calories per 8 fluid ounces or ≤10 calories per 20 fluid ounces.

Further modifications beyond these school food standards might include eliminating flavored, sweetened milks and offering only plain milk; limiting fruit juice; providing entrees of poultry, fish, and beans more often than red meat and processed meats; and replacing solid fats with healthful oils such as canola, sunflower, and olive oil when preparing food, salad dressings and sauces.

Parent Tip: How do I know my child is eating their school lunch?

• An important step is to involve your child with meal decisions and maintain an encouraging and non-judgmental attitude to foster open dialogue.
• Most schools provide monthly calendars of their school lunch offerings that include the main meal and alternatives. Discuss each of the choices with your child and highlight the specific foods in the meal they like, dislike, or aren’t sure of. After school, ask what foods they ate and didn’t eat and why. This can help to plan their future meals and snacks.
• Pack nutritious snacks of string cheese, sunflower or pumpkin seeds, whole or chopped fruit, and cut up vegetables that your child enjoys in case they don’t finish the school lunch offering one day. As children respond positively to variety [5], periodically change up the types of fruits and vegetables in their snack bag.

• If your child does not consume foods offered at school, here are some tips and inspiration for preparing healthy lunchboxes and snack ideas.
• Dabelea, D., et al. Prevalence of Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Among Children and Adolescents From 2001 to 2009. JAMA , 2014. 311(17): p. 1778-86.
• Ogden, C.L., et al. Prevalence of Childhood and Adult Obesity in the United States, 2011-2012. JAMA, 2014;311(8):806-14.
• Vital Signs: Obesity Among Low-Income, Preschool-Aged Children—United States, 2008–2011. MMWR, 2013;62(31);629-34.
• Cohen, J., et al. Impact of the New U.S. Department of Agriculture School Meal Standards on Food Selection, Consumption, and Waste.  Am J Prev Med, 2014;46(4):388-94.
• Schwartz Marlene B., et al. New School Meal Regulations Increase Fruit Consumption and Do Not Increase Total Plate Waste. Childhood Obesity, 2015;11(3): 242-7.

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Pamela koch on why school meals should always be free.

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Pamela Koch is the Executive Director and an Associate Research Professor at the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education and Policy, Program in Nutrition. She conducts research with schools and communities to give people power to demand healthy, just, sustainable food.

Errol Schweizer: What is your professional scope and areas of interests, especially in your leadership role?

Pam Koch: So as the executive director, I kind of oversee everything. And I really think that our mission and vision describe best what we do. The Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food education and policy, conducts research on food and nutrition, education, practice, and policy. And then we translate that research into resources that can be used by educators, policymakers, and advocates to give people power to demand healthy, just sustainable food. And our vision is that through nutrition education, we can change the status quo.

Pamela Koch, Executive Director and an Associate Research Professor at the Laurie M. Tisch Center ... [+] for Food, Education and Policy, Program in Nutrition.

ES: How do you apply this philosophy?

PK: So we really see schools as levers of social change. And so almost all of our research and advocacy relates to schools. We are advocating for really great experiences that students can have with food and nutrition education. And that can include experiences gardening; school gardens are thankfully on the rise. And so many students are getting experiences being in the garden, this hands on experiences, getting to put seeds in the ground and watch them grow. And then to harvest them is really just amazing, not only because of what it does for the students at that time, but it allows them an appreciation or understanding of what it takes to grow food. And I think then they start to think about all the food that they eat in a really, really different way.

Very related to that is our other main research area, working on school meals, because we believe that kids need to eat while they're in school. And then to create the best, most positive meal experience we can have for all students, particularly for the students who are coming from food insecure homes, that are really relying on those meals for a lot of what they're eating. Because it happens each and every day, it can actually be a really great educational tool for kids to learn about food and eating.

We have a school meals program in our country, which is a program that can reach every community in the country because every community has schools. What we realized through this is that when students are in schools, they're basically a captive audience, right? It was this wonderful opportunity to provide food to not only school children, but in many places, also to other people that didn't even have children that needed food, because schools are right there in every community. And so I think what we can really learn is that schools can play a role in food security. 

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I think the other learning from this is the program that's called pandemic electronic benefit transfer (P-EBT). It's like getting a credit card or debit card to be able to use for food. And so what pandemic electronic benefit transfer did is it made up for the breakfast and lunch that children would have gotten in school. So it was for all families who were eligible for free lunch. So that was either families that economically are eligible for free lunch, or families that were actually part of districts that everyone got meals for free. Just to give an example. New York City schools go through the end of June. So from March to June (2020), it was determined that on average, 74 school days were closed, and families got $5.70 a day, which was the cost of breakfast and lunch. So it came to $420. But that made a real difference to families. 

The other really important learning is that basically for this school year, school meals are free for all students. And that is called Universal free meals. And basically there's a lot of debates over whether when we have government programs, they should be universal, like this is, versus targeted for those who need it. I know a lot of other advocates and academics feel the same way that I do on this. It is something that really does make sense to be universal for some of the reasons that I said before, all students are in school all day and they need to eat. And basically, we want to then have the meals be something that feels like it's for everyone.

Right now, it's often seen as a poverty program that happens to be run in schools. And so just as an example, almost all schools will describe where they are by the percentage of students that qualify for free and reduced price lunch. It is reinforcing that this is a poverty program in schools, and that program is really only for poor children. 

Sometimes I give the analogy of what would it be like if instead of school lunch being a poverty program, science books were a poverty program. So if you were a wealthy family, you had to pay for the science book, if you were not such a wealthy family, you got the science book for free. So just think if what we said is like, “Oh, this is a school where 95% of the students qualify for free science books.” It would be a really different way of looking at things. We have this opportunity through school meals being free for the school year, that we can actually see how this works in schools and use this as an opportunity for a lot of experiments of how does the perception of meals change. 

I can tell you, there's a lot of countries around the world that really see school meals as an educational opportunity. Many, many countries really see school meals as an educational part of the day in a way to teach students about food and culture and health and eating and community and less formal ways of interacting with each other. So I hope that that's another one of the learnings that we have is how do we make universal free meals work? 

I always like to say that today's children are tomorrow's adults that are going to be facing the really severe public health consequences we have from our current food supply. They will also be facing the ecological destruction that we are having from our current food supply. And also facing the consequences of the injustice, that particularly black indigenous and people of color/BIPOC communities have had of not having access to healthy food for centuries.

I believe it is really, really important for us, especially with our current food supply, for all children to get really great education and really great hands on experiences with food gardening, cooking and then as they get older to really understand the consequences of the food supply.

ES: What is the relationship between food and wellbeing for children and teenagers in schools, as well as the importance of food education? 

PK: The relationship between food and mental health is an emerging area, and something that we really need to take a lot more seriously and do a lot more research on. The research that we have on it so far really shows it's a two way street. Basically, if you're eating well, you're going to be better able to handle mental health challenges that come up. And it doesn't mean eating well is a remedy for things like depression or other issues. However, if you are eating well, and you are depressed, or having anxiety, you're going to be better be able to respond to therapy. So eating well helps mental health. If you're in good mental health, you're going to be in a place where you actually can have a sense of wellness, a sense of caring about yourself. So I think it means as we're caring for the mental health and wellbeing particularly of our youth, food can help that a lot. 

ES: Any closing thoughts or anything else you want to share?

PK: Get involved! Because if we all do this together, we can make the world a healthier, more just and more sustainable place.

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Pros and Cons of Free Lunch Programs

“If a child eats hot lunch at school every day, they’re having approximately 180 meals out of the year at their educational institution.”

School meals. For many people, these two words bring apathy, if not downright discomfort. Soggy vegetables, wilted salads, and some kind of unidentifiable slosh called “gravy” come to mind.

Still, while not very pleasant, it’s not exactly a picture that you’d expect to cause heated arguments.

Actually, the kind of food schools serve is not the controversy that we’ll be discussing today. Instead, we’ll take a look at school meals in the context of their cost—that is, the pros and cons of offering free school meals to every child.

The Current State of Affairs

“The National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free school lunches to 31 million students at more than 100,000 public and private schools per day,” explains Food Revolution Network . “Meals must meet nutritional standards based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program. It was founded in 1946 by President Harry Truman and operates in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. The NSLP has fed millions of American schoolchildren over the decades. A similar program, the School Breakfast Program (SBP), provides breakfasts to children under the same general guidelines as the NSLP.

Currently, children who attend schools participating in the NSLP have access to free or low-cost meals, but only if they meet specific guidelines laid out by the program. The NSLP has basic requirements for students to be eligible for free or low-cost meals. These guidelines are laid out below by the Public School Review :

• “A child whose family income is at or below 130 percent of the poverty level can receive free meals
• A child whose family income is between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty level can receive reduced-cost meals (Students in this category are not charged more than 40 cents per meal)
• If a child’s family income is over 185 percent of poverty, the student will pay [full] price for meals, which are actually still cost-subsidized by the local school district
• After school snacks are provided for children using the same income guidelines; however, students attending a school where at least 50 percent of students are eligible for NSLP are all provided snacks free of charge”

While the National School Lunch Program provides an incredible number of lunches to school children, it doesn’t offer free meals to every child . The same goes for the School Breakfast Program.

And that’s where the controversy comes in.

Some advocate for free meals for all students, but others oppose this idea. The question is not likely to be settled for years to come, but both sides have good arguments to consider.

Pros of Free Meals for Every Student

“Universal free school meal policy has both a business case and a moral case, and it makes sense whether you see it from the perspective of the child, parent, teacher or taxpayers/society as a whole,” suggests The Guardian . “… giving a free, healthy, hot lunch to all children will improve the health and education outcomes of a whole generation.”

From claims of educational benefits to leveling the proverbial “playing field,” the virtues of this concept are praised high and low. Let’s briefly examine some of the positive aspects of offering free school meals to every child:

• Children can’t learn on an empty stomach. Regardless of family income, many children end up without lunch at school. Their cafeteria tab hasn’t been paid because their single dad simply forgot to pay. Their mom forgot to prepare a packed lunch to take with them. Whatever the case, readily available income isn’t always the issue for a child going hungry. And, a hungry child is a distracted child.

According to the Food Research & Action Center , “Students who eat do better than students who miss meals.…Students in schools with healthy meals for all fared better on tests than their peers in schools without universal [meals] in a carefully controlled study by the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.”

Free meals for all students would significantly reduce the likelihood of hungry children laboring through their studies, regardless of the cause of their hunger.

• Free school meals for all children would “level the playing field.” Often, there are stigmas associated with using a free meal program at school. By far, this is one of the most compelling incentives to universalize free lunches.

According to the FordFoundation, one in three New York City students eligible for a free lunch chooses to go hungry instead of enjoying their free meal. Why? Because of the stigma attached to identifying as a low-income child.

“Some kids are hesitant to participate in the programs, feeling embarrassed that they are different from their peers. There can be a stigma attached to receiving free and reduced lunch, especially in the upper grades, when peer pressure can make kids reluctant to accepting free meals,” explains New America . “In some cases, children may have to go to alternate locations in the school to receive a free meal, separating them from their peers.”

If every student had access to free meals, there would be very little basis for stigmatization or bullying based on a student’s meal ticket.

• Free meals for all help to fight childhood hunger. Regardless of the reasons, thousands of children go hungry at school. Ultimately, free school meals for all students would drastically reduce this problem.

As Civil Eats points out , “School meals have the potential to serve as a safety net for us all.…How can we shape school meals to better (re)connect us to each other, reinforce solidarities across lines of social difference, and provide much-needed support to everyone raising children today?”

Cons of Free Meals for Every Student

“While it’s easy to see the benefits that the NSLP provides, the program has also been subject to controversy and criticism over the years. The program has also struggled to keep up with the increasing demand.”

This evaluation of the National School Lunch Program from Vanco Education highlights a few issues with the program. Now, imagine these issues multiplying substantially across all government-run meal programs if free meals were offered to every student.

This is not the only argument from the opposition. Below are just a few of the objections made by those who don’t support free school breakfasts and lunches for all:

• It’s no secret that nearly anything the government is involved in ends up with mishandled finances, unnecessary costs, and inefficiency. That’s just the cost of the government doing business. It really isn’t surprising, then, that the current school meal programs are plagued with exactly these issues.

The Heritage Foundation points out that these problems already exist in the current meal programs . “According to the Office of Management and Budget, the National School Lunch Program lost nearly $800 million owing to improper payments in fiscal year 2018, while the School Breakfast Program lost $300 million. The Office of Management and Budget calls these programs ‘high-priority’ programs because of the misspending.”

Similarly, the Niskanen Center explains that the NSLP is a prime example of the inefficiency of these types of federal programs . The Niskanen Center states, “According to spending and participation figures from the OMB and USDA respectively…costs have continued to rise, despite the fact that the total number of students in the program declined.”

According to the USDA’s “ School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study ,” the average school meal program operates at a slight deficit. The study also found that the reported cost of offering school meals generally exceeds the federal reimbursements allotted for those meals. It doesn’t appear that the country, in general, can afford to provide free school meals to all students, regardless of their qualifying status.

• The quality of school food isn’t great. There’s an entire group of Americans who are downright concerned about it. Despite these concerns, budget is one factor that keeps food quality low.

“The National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free school lunches to 31 million students at more than 100,000 public and private schools per day.…Participating schools receive approximately $1.30 to spend for each child,” notes the Food Revolution Network . “This amount must cover the food, as well as any labor, equipment, electricity, and other costs … Tight budgets make serving healthier foods challenging.”

Now, imagine providing free meals to ALL students, regardless of income status. With low budgets already causing significant issues as far as food quality goes, we can reasonably assume that the $1.30 per student would be drastically cut with an added influx of new students expecting free school meals.

• According to one PMC study, an estimated $1.2 billion worth of school food is wasted each year. Skeptics of free meals for all schoolchildren fear that waste will only continue to rise if universally free school meals are an option.

A Cambridge University Press study appears to support these concerns : “US public schools, which serve 7·4 billion meals to more than 30 million children represent a prime target for food waste reduction.…Previous research suggests that food waste in US public schools is substantial in magnitude and value.…As SBP [School Breakfast Program] participation continues to increase and universal free school meal programmes expand, total food waste in such programmes is expected to rise concomitantly.”

The Bottom Line

There are good arguments on both sides of this debate.

Children need to eat, and no child should go hungry because of circumstances ultimately out of their control. Free meals for all children would eliminate several complex issues and benefit thousands, if not millions, of children. On the other hand, the objections to the free meal strategy are valid, too. Fiscal responsibility and the quality of the meals offered, for instance, remain huge problems that aren’t likely to get better with larger output.

The bottom line is that Americans must carefully weigh the pros and cons of the issue and develop a logical and effective strategy. No system will be perfect, but with careful thought, research, and creativity, there may just be a suitable answer out there that can satisfy both camps.

We’ll just have to wait and see what that answer might be.

( Really This goes far beyond the commenting! It wrote his thoughts while reading the article amazingly)

[…] Pros and Cons of Free Lunch Programs  […]

[…] result in a financial deficit. The Office of Management and Budget corroborated these findings, reporting that the National School Lunch Program lost $800 million due to “misspending” in 2018. The […]

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How the quality of school lunch affects students’ academic performance

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, michael l. anderson , mla michael l. anderson associate professor of agricultural and resource economics - university of california, berkeley justin gallagher , and jg justin gallagher assistant professor of economics - case western reserve university elizabeth ramirez ritchie err elizabeth ramirez ritchie ph.d. graduate student - university of california-berkeley, department of agricultural and resource economics.

May 3, 2017

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The main goal of the law was to raise the minimum nutritional standards for public school lunches served as part of the National School Lunch Program. The policy discussion surrounding the new law centered on the underlying health reasons for offering more nutritious school lunches, in particular, concern over the number of children who are overweight. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in five children in the United States is obese.

Surprisingly, the debate over the new law involved very little discussion as to whether providing a more nutritious school lunch could improve student learning. A lengthy medical literature examines the link between diet and cognitive development, and diet and cognitive function. The medical literature focuses on the biological and chemical mechanisms regarding how specific nutrients and compounds are thought to affect physical development (e.g., sight), cognition (e.g., concentration, memory), and behavior (e.g., hyperactivity). Nevertheless, what is lacking in the medical literature is direct evidence on how nutrition impacts educational achievement.

We attempt to fill this gap in a new study that measures the effect of offering healthier public school lunches on end of year academic test scores for public school students in California. The study period covers five academic years (2008-2009 to 2012-2013) and includes all public schools in the state that report test scores (about 9,700 schools, mostly elementary and middle schools). Rather than focus on changes in national nutrition standards, we instead focus on school-specific differences in lunch quality over time. Specifically, we take advantage of the fact that schools can choose to contract with private companies of varying nutritional quality to prepare the school lunches. About 12 percent of California public schools contract with a private lunch company during our study period. School employees completely prepare the meals in-house for 88 percent of the schools.

To determine the quality of different private companies, nutritionists at the Nutrition Policy Institute analyzed the school lunch menus offered by each company. The nutritional quality of the menus was scored using the Healthy Eating Index (HEI). The HEI is a continuous score ranging from zero to 100 that uses a well-established food component analysis to determine how well food offerings (or diets) match the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The HEI is the Department of Agriculture’s preferred measure of diet quality, and the agency uses it to “examine relationships between diet and health-related outcomes, and to assess the quality of food assistance packages, menus, and the US food supply.” The average HEI score for the U.S. population is 63.8, while the median HEI score in our study is 59.9. In other words, the typical private company providing public school lunch in CA is a bit less healthy than the average American diet.

We measure the relationship between having a lunch prepared by a standard (below median HEI) or healthy (above median HEI) company relative to in-house preparation by school staff. Our model estimates the effect of lunch quality on student achievement using year-to-year changes between in-house preparation of school meals and outside vendors of varying menu quality, within a given school . We control for grade, school, and year factors, as well as specific student and school characteristics including race, English learner, low family income, school budget, and student-to-teacher ratios.

We find that in years when a school contracts with a healthy lunch company, students at the school score better on end-of-year academic tests. On average, student test scores are 0.03 to 0.04 standard deviations higher (about 4 percentile points). Not only that, the test score increases are about 40 percent larger for students who qualify for reduced-price or free school lunches. These students are also the ones who are most likely to eat the school lunches.

Moreover, we find no evidence that contracting with a private company to provide healthier meals changes the number of school lunches sold. This is important for two reasons. First, it reinforces our conclusion that the test score improvements we measure are being driven by differences in food quality, and not food quantity. A number of recent studies have shown that providing (potentially) hungry kids with greater access to food through the National School Lunch Program can lead to improved test scores. We are among the very few studies to focus on quality, rather than food quantity (i.e., calories). Second, some critics of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act worried that by raising the nutritional standards of school lunches that fewer children would eat the food, thereby unintentionally harming the students that the law was designed to help. Our results provide some reassurance that this is not likely to be the case.

Finally, we also examine whether healthier school lunches lead to a reduction in the number of overweight students. We follow previous literature and use whether a student’s body composition (i.e. body fat) is measured to be outside the healthy zone on the Presidential Fitness Test . We find no evidence that having a healthier school lunch reduces the number of overweight students. There are a few possible interpretations of this finding, including that a longer time period may be necessary to observe improvements in health, the measure of overweight is too imprecise, or that students are eating the same amount of calories due to National School Lunch Program calorie meal targets.

Education researchers have emphasized the need and opportunity for cost-effective education policies . While the test score improvements are modest in size, providing healthier school lunches is potentially a very cost-effective way for a school to improve student learning. Using actual meal contract bid information we estimate that it costs approximately an additional $80 per student per year to contract with one of the healthy school lunch providers relative to preparing the meals completely in-house.

While this may seem expensive at first, compare the cost-effectiveness of our estimated test score changes with other policies. A common benchmark is the Tennessee Star experiment , which found a large reduction in the class size of grades K-3 by one-third correlated with a 0.22 standard deviation test score increase. This reduction cost over $2,000 when the study was published in 1999, and would be even more today. It is (rightfully) expensive to hire more teachers, but scaling this benefit-cost ratio to achieve a bump in student learning gains equal to our estimates, we find class-size increases would be at least five times more expensive than healthier lunches.

Thus, increasing the nutritional quality of school meals appears to be a promising, cost-effective way to improve student learning. The value of providing healthier public school lunches is true even without accounting for the potential short- and long-term health benefits, such as a reduction in childhood obesity and the development of healthier lifelong eating habits. Our results cast doubt on the wisdom of the recently announced proposal by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to roll back some of the school lunch health requirements implemented as part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

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Public Health

Schools ended universal free lunch. now meal debt is soaring.

From Harvest Public Media

Kate Grumke

Oakville Elementary School students go through the lunch line on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, in Oakville, Mo. Brian Munoz/St. Louis Public Radio hide caption

Oakville Elementary School students go through the lunch line on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, in Oakville, Mo.

Pat Broz has been serving meals to students in the Mehlville School District outside of St. Louis for almost 30 years. On a recent day at Oakville Elementary School, the kindergarteners sliding trays toward the register were all dressed up for school pictures. She complimented their outfits as she rang up their lunches.

Yet this year, Broz said fewer students have been coming through her line compared to when in-school meals were free for all students for two school years during the pandemic.

"There was a lot more kids," she said. "Everybody wanted breakfast and lunch."

Her observation bears out in national data. When meals were free last year, schools served more than 80 million more meals compared to the year before the pandemic.

Broz has noticed something else — when she rings up the kids she can see that they owe money for meals they haven't paid for. In fact, students in her district have about four times more meal debt than they typically had before the pandemic.

This school year started with an abrupt switch from pandemic-era free meals to a paid system. As the months have gone by, school districts across the U.S. are reporting signs that families might be struggling to afford school meals.

Meal debt is one strong indicator. Most schools won't deny a student a meal even if they can't pay, but will track their debt and try to collect from families throughout the school year.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Vermont schools say there should be for kids

And this year school officials say meal debt is reaching levels they have never seen. A recent survey from the School Nutrition Association found school districts had more than $19 million in unpaid meal debt, with the Midwest and Great Plains reporting the highest rates of meal debt.

Now lawmakers at the state and federal level are looking for ways to fix a growing problem. Students who eat regular meals at school tend to eat an overall healthier diet, and do better at school, according research .

A handful of states have passed laws mandating universal free meals for students and many more are considering similar legislation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently proposed an expansion to a free meal program, to try to feed significantly more students at high-need schools.

Amelia, a 5-year-old student at Oakville Elementary School, socializes during lunch in March at the school in Oakville, Mo. Kids who eat school meals tend to have a healthier diet. Brian Munoz/St. Louis Public Radio hide caption

Amelia, a 5-year-old student at Oakville Elementary School, socializes during lunch in March at the school in Oakville, Mo. Kids who eat school meals tend to have a healthier diet.

Signs of a problem

When universal free school meals aren't covered, schools instead provide free or reduced price lunch for families in need. But that process is complicated enough that some families fall through the cracks. And that means kids show up at school hungry for lunch but with no way to pay for it.

In the Sioux City Community School District in Iowa this spring, students had about $22,000 in debt. Rich Luze, who runs nutrition for the district, said the government could have handled the ending of the free meal benefit better.

"Giving it for two years, or whatever, and then abruptly stopping it, instead of phasing it down... that could have helped families prepare to readjust and rethink," Luze said.

Instead it looks like fewer families are qualifying for those free and reduced priced meals.

In Mehlville, the school district is serving about as many meals as it did before the pandemic, but the number of students who qualify for free and reduced price meals has dropped from 30% to 26%, said Katie Gegg, director of school food and nutrition services in the district.

"Which doesn't sound like a lot, but with a district of 10,000 students, that's 400 students that might need the support," Gegg said.

Changes all across the country are adding up too. Preliminary data on the national lunch program shows schools served almost 130 million fewer free or reduced price meals in the fall of 2022 compared to the same time period right before the pandemic.

The USDA wants to limit added sugars and sodium in school meals

School nutrition professionals and experts say a few factors have lead to the trend. Many families didn't know they needed to reapply after two years of automatic free meals. Gegg in St. Louis also said the application can be confusing, especially for the many families in her district whose first language is not English.

On top of that, a few years of rising wages could have pushed some families out of the program. To get free meals this year, a family of four has to make less than $36,000 a year. Although the USDA adjusts that number for inflation, food and housing prices are increasing, said Crystal FitzSimons, a director for the Food Research and Action Center.

"Those place a tremendous amount of stress on a household food budget and household budgets overall," FitzSimons said.

Policy solutions and funding struggles

Policymakers are looking at these changing numbers and searching for ways to get closer to the pandemic-era free meals.

California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have all passed legislation to make school meals free for all kids. Other states have passed temporary legislation and many more are considering similar policies.

A student at Oakville Elementary School eats his lunch on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, at the school in Oakville, Mo. Brian Munoz/St. Louis Public Radio hide caption

The Biden administration is also looking for solutions. The USDA proposed a new rule to expand something called the Community Eligibility Provision. It allows schools and districts with a lot of high-need students to serve free meals to all of their kids, without families having to specifically apply. The USDA wants to lower the threshold of high-need students from 40% to 25%, allowing more schools to qualify for the program.

"We're providing greater flexibility, more participation in the program, resources that take a little of the pressure off," said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, while announcing the plan at a school in Greeley, Colo.

Before the pandemic, about one in three school districts in the U.S. were already serving free meals to all students through community eligibility. FitzSimons says this proposal could motivate more schools to opt in.

But she warns, "it doesn't actually increase the amount of federal funding that the school would receive. So we're still hoping that maybe Congress would put in additional funding."

Because states or schools currently have to fund these programs themselves, not all eligible districts choose to participate. In the U.S overall, about 75% of eligible schools chose to adopt the program last school year, but some states had much lower rates of adoption.

For instance, in Nebraska, about 12% of eligible schools took part in the program last year, the second-lowest rate in the U.S.

Nebraska's legislature is considering legislation that would nudge more school districts to sign up for the community eligibility program, to maximize the amount of federal funding schools receive.

State Sen. Eliot Bostar, a Democrat who represents part of Lincoln and sponsored one of the bills, said the biggest hurdle in his state will be the price. The state legislature's fiscal analyst estimates the policy will cost more than $55 million in its first year.

"It's my responsibility to convince my colleagues in the state legislature that this is a worthwhile investment for Nebraska to make in its students and its families," Bostar said.

Bostar said he thinks the free meals during the pandemic demonstrated the value of a program like this.

"It's difficult to have a family these days, it's expensive," he said. "And so anything that we can do to make it a little bit easier to lighten the load or ease the burden is worthwhile."

President Joe Biden requested $15 billion over the next 10 years in his 2024 budget to fund expanded access to the Community Eligibility Program. The administration says this would expand the program to an additional 9 million children around the country.

This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media , a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.

• school lunch
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Why school lunches should be free to all

Ankeny debate underscores need to give all kids free school lunch.

Teachers noticed when some students at Southview Middle School in Ankeny were not eating lunch. When those teachers found out negative balances in lunch accounts were to blame, they started a fundraiser and donated about $1,500.

Such initiative and generosity deserve recognition. It should serve as an example to all of us. Yet charity should not be necessary when it comes to school lunch. 

The situation in Ankeny underscores the need for federal officials to reconsider how millions of children are fed each day. The best option is to provide every student attending K-12 schools with a free lunch. All of us can share in covering the cost the way we share in paying for other aspects of education. 

Considering hungry children cannot focus to learn, providing a meal is as critical to education as math class. And kids should not go without food because their parents didn’t pay the lunch lady.

Unfortunately, the Ankeny school board is considering guidelines that move in the wrong direction. In September it passed the first reading of a policy that deals with how to handle negative lunch balances.

The policy states students in kindergarten through seventh grade would receive lunch, regardless of their balance. However, students in eighth grade and above would be denied food after two meals in the red. Eventually the district will send unpaid account balances to “an outside collections agency.”

Of course, lunch should not be denied to any student, including older ones. And the board seemed to recognize the idea went over like a lead balloon with the public. Members pulled the policy from a subsequent meeting agenda, delaying a vote on the issue until this month.

But this group of unpaid, elected officials is in a tough position.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the country’s school lunch program, has required that every school district develop a negative lunch balance policy. Who is supposed to pay the meal debt owed to the district, which has grown from $5,000 to $43,000 over the past four years? 

More: Provide free lunch to all schoolchildren

Ankeny is a city of relative wealth with a median income about $20,000 higher  than the state median. Its school district may be able to cover lunch bills with donations. But it should not have to, and other districts with less affluent residents could not even hope to do so.

A free lunch for everyone is hardly a radical idea. Taxpayers already subsidize lunches for millions of students from lower-income families. In 2016, three-quarters of the 5 billion lunches served in school cafeterias were provided to students free or at a reduced price.

More than 40 percent of Iowa’s public school students qualified for subsidized meals in the 2016-17 school year, according to data from the Iowa Department of Education . In some districts, including Waterloo and Perry, nearly 70 percent of students are eligible.

How much more would it cost to feed all children? And how much would be saved by eliminating the bureaucracy, administrative expenses and school board headaches created by the current system?

Home — Essay Samples — Education — Public School — School Lunch Should Be Free And More Healthy

School Lunch Should Be Free and More Healthy

• Categories: Public School

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Words: 1078 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 1078 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). Childhood Obesity Facts.
• Food Research & Action Center. (2022). National School Lunch Program. Retrieved from https://www.frac.org/programs/national-school-lunch-program
• Gatto, N. M., Ventura, E. E., Cook, L. T., & Gyllenhammer, L. E. (2012). Davis SPAN Program: A Nutrition Intervention Program for Children with Special Needs. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 112(2), 231–237.
• Government Accountability Office. (2011). National School Lunch Program: Improving Nutrition and Resource Management Could Further Enhance Program’s Effectiveness.
• Honigman, J. (2019). Students protest after Pennsylvania school district threatens to put kids in foster care over unpaid lunch debt.
• Hsin, A., & Muth, M. K. (2008). Effect of Excess Adiposity on Arterial Elasticity in Children. Annals of Pediatric Endocrinology & Metabolism, 13(1), 23–28.
• Neumark-Sztainer, D., Story, M., Hannan, P. J., Perry, C. L., & Irving, L. M. (2004). Weight-Related Concerns and Behaviors Among Overweight and Nonoverweight Adolescents: Implications for Preventing Weight-Related Disorders. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 158(2), 185–193.
• School Nutrition Association. (2022). 2022 Position Paper: School Meal Programs. Retrieved from https://schoolnutrition.org/advocacy/policy-priorities/position-papers/
• The State of Obesity. (2022). Adult Obesity in the United States.
• United States Department of Agriculture. (2022). National School Lunch Program: Participation and Lunches Served. Retrieved from https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/national-school-lunch-program-nslp

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What should Labour learn from Sadiq Khan? Take a stand – and don’t back down

From Ulez to free school meals, London’s mayor introduced bold, principled policies – and won. Keir Starmer, take note

• John McTernan was political secretary to Tony Blair and is now a political strategist

M aybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, but I never doubted that Sadiq Khan would win re-election as the city’s mayor – even when rumours of a surprise upset were being breathlessly repeated. Of course, Labour has always had the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But this has meant that the party is all too often fearful in the face of large opinion poll leads, with an electoral strategy defined by the lessons of painful defeats.

The time has come to learn from winning, and where better to start than Khan’s win in London. This was, to borrow the words of the former Australian Labor prime minister Paul Keating, the “ sweetest victory of all ” – a victory for the true believers. What has gained Khan the two largest personal mandates in British electoral history has been his politics.

The London mayoralty was the inspiration for the metro mayors who are now such a firm fixture of English politics. And it broke so much new ground. Ken Livingstone was the first mayor – and, like Ben Houchen, re-elected Conservative mayor of Tees Valley last week, Livingstone ran against his party. He saw transport as critical, something that Andy Burnham has picked up with Manchester’s Bee Network and Steve Rotheram with Merseyrail, which is setting a template for Labour’s renationalisation of rail .

This is the real politics of devolution. Creating leaders with their own mandates and voices – politicians whose innovations can be copied. In Khan’s case, his lessons for Labour are about navigating the changing contours of British politics.

Currently, political discourse remains relentlessly focused on the battle on the right of British politics. The 26-point swing to Labour in Blackpool South was barely discussed. Not because it was the fifth swing of more than 20% from Tories to Labour in this parliament – a record better than New Labour in the run-up to 1997 – but rather because the Reform party were held in third place by the Tories.

Who cares? Really, who cares – apart from Rishi Sunak and No 10 – about the battles within, and for, a third of British voters ? Labour’s dominance in the polls seems to have obscured the core fact that the future of the country – and the success or failure of the Labour party – is bound up with the other two-thirds of voters who are supporting progressive parties.

Adopting modern marketing speak, Keir Starmer’s Labour has identified its “hero voters” and focused relentlessly on them. While this was understandable following the rout of the 2019 election and the collapse of parts of the “red wall” into Tory hands, the fact is that the real realignment in British politics is on the centre left. Labour needs to worry about losing votes to the Lib Dems, Greens and independents rather than fixate on one particular image of rightwing voters.

When you’re on 45% in the polls, half of all voters should be your “heroes” – and Khan gets that. He called Gaza right, speaking out for a ceasefire on 27 October last year when it was becoming clear that the humanitarian case was becoming overwhelming. It was a moral position, but it was also a recognition of what Labour’s base wanted – young Londoners, graduates and ethnic-minority voters. London Labour didn’t face the same challenge of independents that took seats across England and got almost one in eight votes in the West Midlands mayoral campaign. Khan knows political representation is a dialogue – you lead, but you also need to follow, or rather channel, your electorate.

And he isn’t afraid to lead. The expansion of the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) didn’t create a powerful car lobby – that has existed for a long time. His triumph over that lobby is instructive and will be critical in Labour’s first term in government, should it win – the need to replace fuel duty with road charging will become urgent because of revenue being lost by the transition to electric vehicles. Khan understood that in London there is a majority for clean air: he squeezed the progressive vote, winning the support of a Lib Dem voters in the capital, and seeing the Green vote fall while his rose. The same is likely to be true elsewhere.

He also stands and fights. The mayor didn’t back off when Ulez was attacked – he stood his ground. That’s a model for Labour, which needs to be seen to stand for something. He also keeps moving. His policy of free school meals for primary pupils is just the kind of progressive universalism that the Labour party should follow.

The coming general election will show the extent to which the pandemic and the change to working from home – and rising house prices – has exported a Labour-leaning London electorate to the greater south-east of England. Local election results, from Aldershot to Colchester, suggest this is a boost for Starmer’s chances. But Khan’s victory is ultimately a vindication that, in the end, good policies are good politics.

John McTernan was political secretary to Tony Blair and is now a political strategist for BCW

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David French

Colleges Have Gone off the Deep End. There Is a Way Out.

By David French

Opinion Columnist

I had my head in a law book when I heard the drums. That was the sound of the first campus protest I ever experienced. I’d come to Harvard Law School in the fall of 1991 as a graduate of a small, very conservative Christian college in Nashville. Many of my college classmates had passionate religious and political commitments, but street protest was utterly alien to the Christian culture of the school. We were rule followers, and public protest looked a bit too much like anarchy for our tastes.

But Harvard was different. The law school was every bit as progressive as my college was conservative, and protest was part of the fabric of student life, especially then. This is the era when a writer for GQ magazine, John Sedgwick, called the law school “ Beirut on the Charles ” because it was torn apart by disputes over race and sex. There were days when campus protests were festive, almost celebratory. There were other days when the campus was seething with rage and fury.

That first protest was in support of faculty diversity, and it was relatively benign. I walked outside and followed the sound of the drums. A group of roughly 100 protesters was marching in front of the law school library, and soon they were joined by an allied group of similar size from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I watched as they danced, sang and listened to speeches by student activists and sympathetic professors. That first protest had an angry edge, but it was also completely peaceful and endlessly fascinating to a kid from a small town in Kentucky who’d never seen a drum circle before.

But things soon got worse, much worse. Protests got more unruly, and student activists got more aggressive. The entire campus was in a state of conflict. In Sedgwick’s words, students were “waging holy war on one another.” Small groups of students occupied administrative offices, and angry activists shouted down their political opponents in class and often attempted to intimidate them outside class. I was shouted down repeatedly, and twice I received disturbing handwritten notes in my campus mailbox in response to my anti-abortion advocacy. My student peers told me to “go die.”

Watching the protests and experiencing the shout-downs changed the course of my career. I was both enthralled by the power of protest and repulsed by the efforts to silence dissenters. Given the immense cultural influence of American higher education, I agreed with the Supreme Court’s famous words in the 1957 case Sweezy v. New Hampshire : “Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.” Those words, combined with my own negative encounters at Harvard, helped define my legal career. From that point forward, I would defend free speech.

It’s been more than 30 years since that first campus protest, and over that time I’ve seen countless protests, I’ve defended countless protesters — and I’ve even been protested against at several schools. In the course of those cases and confrontations, I’ve learned that the issue of campus protest is remarkably complex and that campus culture is at least as important as law and policy in setting the boundaries of debate.

There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission. Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?

The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law. That means universities should protect the rights of students and faculty members on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.

That also means showing no favoritism among competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities. All groups should have equal rights to engage in the full range of protected speech, including by engaging in rhetoric that’s hateful to express and painful to hear. Public chants like “Globalize the intifada” may be repugnant to many ears, but they’re clearly protected by the First Amendment at public universities and by policies protecting free speech and academic freedom at most private universities.

Still, reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.

Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space. If one group is permitted to occupy a quad indefinitely, for example, then that action by necessity excludes other organizations from the same ground. In that sense, indefinitely occupying a university quad isn’t simply a form of expression; it also functions as a form of exclusion. Put most simply, student groups should be able to take turns using public spaces, for an equal amount of time and during a roughly similar portion of the day.

Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment-protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences. There is a long and honorable history of civil disobedience in the United States, but true civil disobedience ultimately honors and respects the rule of law. In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness. No matter the frustration of campus activists or their desire to be heard, true civil disobedience shouldn’t violate the rights of others. Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.

The result of lawlessness is chaos and injustice. Other students can’t speak. Other students can’t learn. Teachers and administrators can’t do their jobs.

In my experience as a litigator , campus chaos is frequently the result of a specific campus culture. Administrators and faculty members will often abandon any pretense of institutional neutrality and either cooperate with their most intense activist students or impose double standards that grant favored constituencies extraordinary privileges. For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says , “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I vividly remember representing a campus Christian group in a dispute at Tufts University in 2000 . The group had been derecognized for requiring that student leaders of their group share that group’s traditional sexual ethic, which reserves sex for heterosexual marriage. You might disagree strongly with that view, but granting religious groups the flexibility to impose faith-based requirements on religious leaders fits squarely within the American tradition of free exercise of religion.

Tufts is a private university, so it has some flexibility in suppressing religious expression on campus, but it had no excuse for attempting to toss a Christian group from campus at the same time that it permitted acts of intimidation against those Christian students. For example, at the most contentious moment of the dispute, Tufts officials prevented my student clients and me from entering the hearing room where their appeal was being heard, while a crowd of protesters gathered in a darkened hallway, pressed up around us and herded us into a corner of the hall. There was no campus outrage at this act of intimidation. We saw no administrative response.

University complicity in chaos isn’t unusual. In a case I worked on when I was president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, we discovered that administrators at Washington State University’s Pullman campus had actually helped plan a disruptive protest against a play put on by a student director, an intentionally provocative show that mocked virtually every group on campus.

University or faculty participation in unlawful protest isn’t confined to the cases I worked on. At Oberlin College, administrative facilitation of ugly and defamatory student protests outside a local business ultimately cost the school $36 million in damages. At Columbia, hundreds of sympathetic faculty members staged their own protest in support of the student encampment on the quad, and there are reports that other faculty members have attempted to block members of the media from access to the student encampment.

None of this is new. All of it creates a culture of impunity for the most radical students. Disruptive protesters are rarely disciplined, or they get mere slaps on the wrist. They’re hailed as heroes by many of their professors. Administrators look the other way as protesters pitch their tents on the quad — despite clear violations of university policy. Then, days later, the same administrators look at the tent city on campus, wring their hands, and ask, “How did this spiral out of control?”

There is a better way . When universities can actually recognize and enforce the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness, they can protect both the right of students to protest and the rights of students to study and learn in peace.

In March a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him , walked into a university facility that was closed to protest and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.

But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline, three were expelled , and one was suspended.

The message was clear: Every student can protest, but protest has to be peaceful and lawful. In taking this action, Vanderbilt was empowered by its posture of institutional neutrality . It does not take sides in matters of public dispute. Its fundamental role is to maintain a forum for speech, not to set the terms of the debate and certainly not to permit one side to break reasonable rules that protect education and safety on campus.

Vanderbilt is not alone in its commitment to neutrality. The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles , a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

Contrast Vanderbilt’s precise response with the opposing extremes. In response to the chaos at Columbia, the school is finishing the semester with hybrid classes, pushing thousands of students online. The University of Southern California canceled its main stage commencement ceremony , claiming that the need for additional safety measures made the ceremony impractical. At both schools the inability to guarantee safety and order has diminished the educational experience of their students.

While U.S.C. and Columbia capitulate, other schools have taken an excessively draconian approach. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas posted on X, “Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.” On April 25 the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sent a forceful letter to the president of the University of Texas at Austin condemning the display of force on campus. “U.T. Austin,” it wrote, “at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott, appears to have pre-emptively banned peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters due solely to their views rather than for any actionable misconduct.”

At Emory University, footage emerged of police tackling a female professor who posed no obvious danger to the police or anyone else. Protests are almost always tense, and there is often no easy way to physically remove protesters from campus, but the video footage of the confrontation with the professor was shocking. It’s hard to conceive of a justification for the violent police response.

At this moment, one has the impression that university presidents at several universities are simply hanging on, hoping against hope that they can manage the crisis well enough to survive the school year and close the dorms and praying that passions cool over the summer.

That is a vain hope. There is no indication that the war in Gaza — or certainly the region — will be over by the fall. It’s quite possible that Israel will be engaged in full-scale war on its northern border against Hezbollah. And the United States will be in the midst of a presidential election that could be every bit as contentious as the 2020 contest.

But the summer does give space for a reboot. It allows universities to declare unequivocally that they will protect free speech, respect peaceful civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law by protecting the campus community from violence and chaos. Universities should not protect students from hurtful ideas, but they must protect their ability to peacefully live and learn in a community of scholars. There is no other viable alternative.

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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation .” You can follow him on Threads ( @davidfrenchjag ).