[jasode]

>The only thing I find to be less valuable [...] is popular media editorials interpreting research results

In this case, the medium is not the message here. That page wasn't an "editorial" in the sense that a dilettante newspaper editor put his own spin on research he didn't know.

Instead, Levitt himself was writing an article that was short enough for the editorial space alloted. His longer text is chapter 5 in his Freakonomics book. (In other words, the so-called "editorial" was advertising hype for his book.)

I just linked the USA Today page because I thought it was more convenient than trying to deep-link a copyrighted book.[1][2]

It was a government study so presumably, Levitt got the raw data and reports from here: https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/getpubcats.asp?sid=024

[1] best link I could do but it's not the whole book so it's incomplete: https://books.google.com/books?id=pGJ-BwAAQBAJ&pg=PT25&dq=fr...

[2] Google Books doesn't let you deep-link to Chapter 5 of Freakonomics: https://books.google.com/books?id=wNPnl5zYA-cC&printsec=fron...