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Comment by lonelappde | Hacker News Reader

Teachers are not feeding kids in statistically significant volumes. Schools are, and there might be correlations.

Is it possible that good teachers hang out in the lunchroom and encourage their students to eat? I don’t think it’s fair to so readily dismiss the hypothesis without a good look at the relevant data.

If children aren't eating, the cause is most likely not being able to afford food, or not being provided with food by their parents. If teachers were to have any effect, it would be by giving the children money or food, not "hanging out" and "encouraging" them.

Good teachers manage to prevent their school enacting bad policy like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/19/us/school-lunch-debt-dona...

>Teachers are not feeding kids in statistically significant volumes.

Likely untrue, given a few moments search. For example, "On average, teachers spend $37 a month and principals spend $59 a month for food for their students." [1].

There's lots more data on teachers feeding kids in perhaps causal amounts.

[1] http://neatoday.org/2013/09/10/report-teachers-spend-37-ever...

How many students do teachers have on average? $37 per month definitely does not seem significant enough to explain the effect found.

Avg public school teacher:student ratio is 16:1, avg school meal costs $2.48. This may be a non-negligible effect.

Given the strong correlation between some breakfast vs none, and school performance, it would not take much to affect the outcomes by feeding hungry kids little snacks.

The linked article cites a survey that it doesn’t currently link to, if it ever did, and implies it’s because kids are hungry; but without the survey we don’t know how it is phrased and they could be spending that money just to get the entire class cupcakes for birthdays or some kind of treats for holidays, rather than for feeding the hungry kids.

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