School feeding and learning achievement: Evidence from India's midday meal program

Abstract

We study the effect of the world's largest school feeding program on children's learning outcomes. Staggered implementation across different states of a 2001 Indian Supreme Court Directive mandating the introduction of free school lunches in public primary schools generates plausibly exogenous variation in program exposure across different birth cohorts. We exploit this to estimate the effect of program exposure on math and reading test scores of primary school-aged children. We find that midday meals have a dramatic positive effect on learning achievement: children with up to 5 years of primary school exposure improve their test scores by approximately 10-20%. We further investigate various channels that may account for this improvement including enrollment and nutrition-learning effects, heterogeneous responses by socio-economic status, complementary schooling inputs, and intra-household redistribution. JEL-Codes: I210, I250, O120. in Burkina Faso find positive effects of school feeding programs on school participation. 2 In a rare non-randomized evaluation of an extant national program, McEwan (2013) uses a regression discontinuity design to study the effect of Chile's long-established school feeding program on (among other things) fourth-grade test scores. The discontinuity comes from the fact that students received meals with different caloric content depending on a school-level "vulnerability" index cutoff. McEwan (2013) finds that there is no difference in test performance when the caloric content of meals is increased.

Inequalities in adolescent learning: Does the timing and persistence of food insecurity at home matter?

“…A midday-meal is also provided in preschool centres as part of early childhood support. Recent evidence has demonstrated the programme's positive impact on learning (Chakraborty & Jayaraman, 2016) and on mitigating the effects of early shocks on preschool nutritional status (A. Singh, Park, & Dercon, 2014).…”

Correlates of Academic Performance in Pupils under a Feeding Program

“…Performance evaluation of the program reported increase in school enrolment, decrease in pupil and teacher absenteeism and improvement of health among primary school children. A recent study [28] examining the nutrition-learning link in the program showed increase in standardized test scores for reading and mathematics. In comparison, the present study showed evidence of the association between nutritional status and mean school grades, although the improved status could have been sustained to the household level.…”

Economic consequences of better health: insights from clinical data

“…On average, healthy children have better educational outcomes than unhealthy children, and this educational advantage translates to higher earnings over their lifetime 78921. Experiments around the world found significantly higher maths and language scores and attendance rates in schools that operated a school feeding programme compared with schools that did not 2223242526. A randomised trial in a region of India with widespread iron deficiency anaemia found that maths and language scores were higher among children who regularly participated in a school feeding programme that included salt fortified with iron 27.…”