…and allow me to (tongue-in-cheek) suggest an alternate title: Where Girls Outperform Boys in English: 10,000 / 10,000 School Districts, Seriously, It’s Not Even Close

The article’s third paragraph, included immediately after this awesome visualization, tells us that the study suggests some interesting things (emphasis mine):

The research, based on 260 million standardized test scores for third through eighth graders in nearly every district in the country, suggests that local norms influence how children perform in school from early ages – and that boys are much more influenced than girls.

Which I found surprising, because local norms don’t seem to show up anywhere in that awesome data visualization. “Richer Parents”, being nerdy and data-driven and therefore quantifiable along an X-axis, doesn’t quite translate. Still, sometimes these things show up in the underlying study and don’t make the graphic, so I went to the study and ctrl-f’d for “local norms” and bingo:

This paper has several limitations…Another is that we do not have good measures of local norms, expectations, stereotypes, or of how boys and girls are treated in school and home and community. Because of this, we cannot rule out the potentially important influence these factors may have on gender achievement gaps that we may be unable to observe with our coarse proxy measure.

Local norms may or may not cause the trends we see in that chart up above, but they weren’t tracked in any scientific way in this study. This study also doesn’t appear to have any data on which gender was more or less influenced by such things (since they didn’t measure such things in the first place), so the follow up punch in the Times’ summary of this research, “boys are much more influenced than girls“, caught my attention.

Not necessarily because it’s untrue, but because it suggests a reading of this study that’s colored by knowledge from elsewhere, to such a degree that this study is taken as further evidence in support of that prior knowledge base. Since the article had not yet given me, a normal Times reader, any info on which gender might be more or less influenced by various norms, their summary sparked a brief moment of incongruity. I try to notice those moments, as they often signal a deeper difference in the lens someone else uses to look at the world…