But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, that progress was reversed. Boys now outscore girls on standardized math tests in more than 87% of districts in 33 states, according to a new Associated Press data analysis.
The AP analyzed data from the Stanford Education Data Archive showing how boys and girls performed on math assessments over 15 years in more than 5,000 school districts across the U.S.
The publicly available dataset includes measurements of how far above or below grade level students scored on subject tests. These measurements are standardized from raw test scores to allow for direct comparison between districts despite differences in tests.
Details on how to access the dataset are below, as are findings from AP's analysis and guidance on how to use the data.
We provide publishable sentences on notable data for these states: Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Delaware, and Illinois.
We also provide publishable sentences for dozens of school districts, including the 10 largest districts in our analysis: Los Angeles; Miami-Dade County, Florida; Clark County, Nevada; Broward County, Florida; Hillsborough County, Florida; Orange County, Florida; Palm Beach County, Florida; Houston, Texas; Gwinnett County, Georgia; and Montgomery County, Maryland.