Food for thought: the effects of school accountability plans on school nutrition

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, school accountability is now federal law, continuing the recent trend of states implementing significant accountability systems for schools. This paper studies an unusual yet powerful school response to accountability systems. Using disaggregated school lunch menus from a random sample of school districts in Virginia, we find that schools threatened with accountability sanctions increase the caloric content of their lunches on testing days in an apparent attempt to boost short-term student cognitive performance. Moreover, we find that the schools that responded the most along these dimensions experienced the greatest improvements in standardized test scores.