Food for Thought: SNAP Distribution and Student Achievement

Decades of innovative education reform have focused on how to improve schools, yet academic success is about more than just classrooms and teachers. One factor that may affect student achievement is food stability; researchers and policymakers are asking how a student’s access to nutritional food impacts that student’s success in school.

In the United States, millions of low-income families rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as Food Stamps, to provide food to their families. This assistance is provided via monthly transfers to a plastic card that allows parents to make food purchases. Previous research has shown a correlation between nutrition and the SNAP distribution cycle. Recipients tend to buy more food, and healthier food, soon after receiving their family’s transfer. Two newer studies published earlier this year have drawn a link between this timing of SNAP distribution and test scores, indicating that the SNAP nutrition pattern may also affect students’ cognitive functioning and academic achievement.

In one recent study, Anna Gassman-Pines and Laura Bellows gathered test scores from an annual standardized test given in Spring 2012 in North Carolina, and matched student information with data about the distribution of SNAP benefits in the same year and month. In North Carolina, the day of the month on which participants receive SNAP benefits is determined randomly, so the researchers were able to treat the different transfer dates as randomly-assigned groups. Each of the groups was labeled based on how recently the students had received SNAP benefits before taking the standardized exam. Some students took the test immediately after their family received the transfer, while some took it a couple of weeks later, and others took the exam near the end of their family’s monthly benefit cycle.

Gassman-Pines and Bellows matched these groups to the test results and found a correlation between SNAP transfer dates and scores. Students achieved higher scores when they took the exam in the second and third weeks after SNAP benefits arrived. The students scored lower when they took the test near the end of the month before their family’s benefits were transferred, or immediately after the benefits arrived. Since the students were assigned a SNAP transfer date randomly, the authors could draw a causal link; they claim that students’ academic achievement is directly impacted by this food instability.

Interestingly, a similar study by Chad Cotti, John Gordanier and Orgul Ozturk was published a few months after the North Carolina study. Cotti et al. employed an analogous design to examine the relationship between SNAP distribution schedules and math exam results in South Carolina. However, the researchers accessed several years of data between 2000 and 2012, allowing them to examine how a single student might perform differently in years where the test date fell on different days during the monthly benefit cycle. The results of this second study are largely similar to the first – Cotti et al. found the lowest scores when students took the test in the days immediately before or after their monthly SNAP transfer.

Although the two research teams report almost identical findings, their interpretations of the policy implications differ. According to Cotti et al., their findings indicate that SNAP recipients do not appropriately budget their benefits throughout the month, which leads to a dip in nutrition and, therefore, a decline in student achievement near the end of the monthly cycle. As a result, they suggest that policymakers consider dispersing payments at intervals throughout the month to encourage parents to regularly purchase healthy food in order to support their children’s academic success.

On the other hand, Gassman-Pines and Bellows suggest that the results simply indicate that SNAP benefits are insufficient; they imply that recipients are able to budget the benefits suitably throughout the month, as long as they are given enough to feed their families in a nutritious way. Gassman-Pines and Bellows assert that increasing the amount of SNAP benefits for low-income families would have a positive impact on academic achievement for students from such families.

As low-income students in the U.S. continue to lag behind their affluent peers academically, it is important that policymakers consider how food stability is impacting the country’s youngest citizens. Perhaps future research will help to more clearly identify the cause of these student achievement patterns, as well as the most effective and efficient solution that will allow students to maintain food stability and succeed academically.

Article Sources: Gassman-Pines, Anna, & Bellows, Laura, “Food Instability and Academic Achievement: A Quasi-Experiment Using SNAP Benefit Timing,” American Educational Research Journal Vol. 55, Issue 5 (2018): 897-927;

Cotti, Chad, John Gordanier and Orgul Ozturk. “When Does It Count? The Timing of Food Stamp Receipt and Educational Performance,” Economics of Education Review 66 (2018): 40-50.

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