Boy - girl achievement differences in BC school districts
In today's Globe and Mail I read an interesting article about how the Toronto school board is discussing a proposal to create some boys only schools in an effort to reduce the achievement gap between boys and girls. Here in BC, the Vancouver Sun's Janet Steffenhagen blogged today about how districts in BC are ignoring at this issue, citing North Vancouver as an example.
This would appear to me to be a perfect example of putting the data from the Foundation School Assessment tests to work. The data from these is easily obtainable, and luckily by using the pdftotext utility it's easy to quickly parse it. It only took me a few minutes to download all the reports and to put together a quick script that produces an overall index of the gender gap between boys and girls, using the six measures (reading, writing, numeracy for both grade 4s and 7s). The higher the score, the bigger the gap.
The results are below, and are fairly surprising to me. While on the face of it there does appear to be some relationship between the socioeconomic situation of different districts, that's not always the case. The best districts in the province (the ones with the lowest boy-girl gap) are Delta, Haida Gwaii, and Nisga'a. I wonder what they are doing there as compared to Qualicum, Fort Nelson, or even North Vancouver?
