What’s Cooking? Effects of a School Breakfast Program on Student Achievement

Most free breakfast programs occur in the cafeteria in the before-school hours and often have low participation rates, despite growing concerns on childhood nutrition and poverty. In their recent working paper, “The Effect of Providing Breakfast on Student Performance: Evidence from an In-Class Breakfast Program,” researchers Scott Imberman and Adriana Kugler examine students’ academic outcomes after a school district implemented an in-class breakfast program.

To determine whether such programs have positive effects on students’ academic outcomes, researchers gathered data from 88 elementary schools in a district in the Southwest United States. Schools in the study had recently switched from a cafeteria-based early morning program to an in-class breakfast program, meaning that all students were now served breakfast. By comparing outcomes among students whose schools implemented the breakfast program early, with students in schools that implemented the program later, the authors were able to measure the effect of in-classroom breakfast on standardized test results, attendance rates, grades, and Body Mass Indexes (BMIs).

The researchers found that participation in the new breakfast program was linked with an increase in math and reading scores of 0.1 standard deviations. By way of comparison, the black-white achievement gap in reading is often estimated to be 0.8 standard deviations. Most of this impact was from students who were low achievers prior to the program. Hispanic students also showed substantial improvements, while growth among black students was not statistically significant. Similarly, English Language Learners experienced a greater score increase than non-English Language Learners, and low-income students and students with low BMIs experienced a bigger effect on math scores than did their peers. The authors note that although the program appears to have improved test scores, there was no impact on student grades, and only a slight increase in attendance, specifically for high-achieving students. Time spent in the program seemed to have little effect on student outcomes.

The authors conclude that an effect on test scores, though not on grades, suggests the program may be impacting test-day performance but not long-term learning. Since 11 weeks is a short trial period and it was impossible to separately measure the students who had switched from not eating breakfast to eating breakfast under the new program, the authors caution that the results could represent a lower bound estimate of the ‘breakfast effect’.

These findings complement other research showing that children perform better academically after having eaten breakfast. When considered alongside research mentioned in the paper that showed greater participation with in-class breakfast programs than a before-school breakfast program, such a finding has important policy implications, though a longer-term study could produce more definitive results.

Chicago Public Schools is currently the largest district in the nation to implemente a district-wide “Breakfast in the Classroom” program similar to the one studied in the NBER working paper. The program is now beginning its third year, but underwent some changes in its second year, due to concerns that such breakfast was not an effective use of class time and could encourage obesity in schools where most children eat breakfast at home.

Policymakers are still waiting on large-scale evaluations of the Chicago program.

Feature Photo: cc/Ozmafan