The Impact of Community Eligibility Provision on Multilingual Learner Outcomes

Abstract

Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows schools that meet certain criteria to provide free meals to all students. I provide new evidence on the impact of CEP with a focus on a particular group of students: those who are Multilingual Learners (MLL). These students may have been less likely to enroll to receive free meals before CEP even when income-eligible and were potentially less likely to take-up free meals when enrolled during the pre-CEP period due to heightened stigma. Using a student-level panel from North Carolina, I estimate the impact of CEP on MLL student math and reading achievement and school suspensions. I estimate student fixed effects models that suggest CEP positively impacts MLL students, whose math and reading test scores improve .032 and .082 of a standard deviation, respectively, on average when they attend schools enrolled in CEP. These students also see a reduction in the chance of being suspended in a given year of ∼2.3%, a 20% reduction of the mean, though this finding is more sensitive to how school-level poverty is measured.