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But unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" - which isn't supporte

But unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" - which isn't supported by the evidence, because there may be other factors that coincide with those who are eligible for them. You'd have to do something like take the high-performing SF district and give half the students, randomly selected, free lunches.

pc86 2y ago
Reduced-price lunches are a proxy for socioeconomic status. That it's a proxy means it isn't perfect but we're talking about the entire country you can absolutely draw conclusions from it based on the mountains of data we have available.
lolinder 2y ago
> unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" Nonsense, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs are correlated with kids who do worse", which they absolutely are!