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Does receiving a school free lunch lead to a stigma effect? Evidence from a longitudinal analysis in South Korea

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Abstract

A common rationale for providing free lunch for all students is that selectively receiving a free meal at school generates stigma. This study examines the hypothesis that eligibility to receive a school free lunch has negative effects on student educational outcomes, and that this stigma-effect is more severe in schools where a low proportion of students receives a free lunch at school. To do so, we use a sparse optimal matching method within a multilevel growth framework. Our results reveal that free school lunch status does not have significant net impact on students’ average educational achievements or growth rate during middle school. Educational achievement in middle school is, however, significantly affected by the interaction between school free lunch status and the proportion of students in the school receiving a free school lunch, with students experiencing a stigma effect in schools with a low proportion of free lunch students.

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Notes

  1. This project is a comprehensive support program targeting minority students. It provides supplemental educational services for learning, psychological development, and cultural experience emphasizing a collaboration between schools and communities (Baek et al. 2013). The Education Action Zone (EAZ) in the UK and the Zones d'Education Priorities (ZEP) in the France have similar characteristics with the EWPP.

  2. Unlike the US, eligible/ineligible students receive the same school meal plan, and apart from additional small snacks and treats, other “competitive foods” which can substantially substitute the school meal are not available for purchase. The payment for a school meal is made monthly through parents’ bank accounts (i.e. school banking system). For free meal students, the payment is made by a school administration office (Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education 2017). Thus, it is less likely that free lunch status is exposed to peers at lunch time; this raises the possibility that rather than the visibility of a school free lunch status, psychological deprivation triggered by the composition of free lunch students at schools may be responsible for creating stigma effects. However, before the one-click support policy, the application process was generally made through classroom teachers. It has been pointed out that free lunch status is often unintentionally exposed to classmates due to careless administrative management of teachers (An 2011).

  3. Unfortunately, we cannot directly measure students’ feeling of being stigmatized in these data. In the present study, we assume that negative effects of stigma will be reflected in students’ cognitive and non-cognitive educational outcomes (e.g., self-esteem). The limitations of our approach are further discussed in the discussion section.

  4. In Seoul, unlike the US, there was no reduced-priced lunch. Those students from families below 60 percentage of median earnings were eligible to apply the school free lunch program.

  5. Unfortunately, the SELS data does not provide the percentage of school free lunch variable for the baseline year. This study thus employed the 2nd year of the percentage of school free lunch variable. Transfer students are not included in the matched sample.

  6. It is worthwhile to mention that since students were randomly assigned to Seoul schools based on a public lottery (Park et al. 2013), it is less likely that there is an endogeneity issue in the proportion of school free lunch students.

  7. A standardized mean difference should not differ by more than a quarter of a SD. A ratio of the variances of the covariates after adjustment between .80 and 1.25 is desirable and those < .50 or > 2.0 are too extreme (Cochran 1965; Rubin 2001).

  8. In general, we are concerned that those schools with more support for socioeconomically disadvantaged students are likely to have greater student enrollment in the school free lunch program and improved educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, leading to over-estimates of the free lunch status effect (free-lunch student outcomes will look better than they really are). Thus, we would expect to find that the estimated magnitude of the free lunch status coefficients will be reduced in the school-fixed effects models compared to the models using grand-mean centering.

  9. The ICC for the matched sample for their first year of GPA is .000, and it slightly increases to .001 and .038 by year 3. For the whole sample, the ICC for the first year of GPA is .135, .177 for the second year, and .149 for the third year.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper received the best graduate student paper prize from Statistics Korea and was presented at the 2018 annual meeting of American Educational Research Association (AERA), New York in the U.S. We thank anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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Correspondence to Baeksan Yu.

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This study employed the Seoul Educational Longitudinal Study (SELS) data with permission from the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education. All students gave their informed consent prior to their participation in the study.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Description of original variables
Table 6 Robustness checks for the potential influence of unobserved confounders

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Yu, B., Lim, H. & Kelly, S. Does receiving a school free lunch lead to a stigma effect? Evidence from a longitudinal analysis in South Korea. Soc Psychol Educ 22, 291–319 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-019-09485-7

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