What can the federal government do to help ensure that the public schools attended by children living in poverty have enough resources to serve their students? In this brief, we describe existing federal efforts to support education spending in high-poverty districts, discuss their limitations, and suggest alternative approaches for federal policy. We focus especially on the Education Finance Incentive Grant (EFIG) formula—a part of the compensatory Title I grant program designed to encourage changes to state school finance policy—and show that the incentives embedded in the formula are in fact negligible; revising the formula to be more effective would be difficult. Further, any attempt to incentivize desirable state policy faces a fundamental trade-off: Such policy can reinforce inequality because districts in states that do not respond to the incentives by adopting desirable policies also do not receive (as much) federal funding. We argue that federal policy should be more attentive to state fiscal capacity because it is an important determinant of district-level school spending, and the federal government is uniquely positioned to address between-state inequality.

This paper examines whether schoolwide free meals affect disciplinary outcomes, focusing on the use of suspensions. Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not qualify individually, and potentially decreasing the stigma associated with school meals. We leverage the staggered rollout of CEP across states and school discipline measures for the near-universe of public schools to assess how disciplinary infractions change within a school as it becomes eligible for CEP. We conclude that schoolwide free meals reduced suspensions statistically significantly by approximately 17 percent for white male elementary students. Point estimates for other subgroups in elementary schools, and overall, are negative but smaller in magnitude; while treatment effects for black students are statistically insignificant, we also cannot rule out equal treatment effects between black and white students. We lack statistical power to rule large positive or negative effects for middle and high school students. The reductions among white students are somewhat larger in areas with high baseline poverty rates, consistent with universal meals programs serving an unmet need.