Does "No Child Left Behind" Contribute to Obesity?

Photo: edenpictures

That’s the question posed in a new working paper by Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. What would the mechanism/s be? “Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children’s health. For example, schools may cut back on recess and physical education in favor of increasing time on tested subjects.” Caveats apply, but the scholars find that “schools that were on the margin of passing have about a 0.5 percentage point higher rate of overweight in the following year.”