Privatizing school lunches may be bad for academic performance

Public schools that use private food services may not save much money. Worse yet, they may be hurting student performance, a U-M researcher says.

A new study by Roland Zullo, assistant research scientist at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, suggests that schools in Michigan using private companies to prepare and serve lunch, and often breakfast, to their students realize no significant cost savings.

While public schools that privatize their food operations save about 15 percent on labor and 4 percent on food, they end up spending 11 percent more on contractor fees and 4 percent more for supplies, Zullo says.

"If economic savings fail to materialize, then we would expect that districts with private food services would not gain additional classroom resources," says Zullo, who notes that districts with private food-service management have an average of 1.1 more children per teacher. "While I hesitate to conclude that privatization increases class sizes, the results do not indicate that privatizing food services liberates resources for the classroom."

After controlling for affluence, school resources and student traits, the study shows that private food service is associated with a reduction of 1-3 percent in scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests for students in third through ninth grades. This is especially true for third- through fifth-graders and with the English, reading and writing tests.

The culprit? Private food services tend to serve more high-fat and high-sugar foods on their a la carte menu.

Read the study at www.ilir.umich.edu/LSC/Publications/PrivatizedSchoolFoodServiceAndStudentPerformance.pdf.

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