It’s National Bullying Prevention Month, so there’s a decent chance you’ll be seeing a statistic that has — for years — appeared in magazines, newspapers, and social media: 160,000 kids stay home from school each day to avoid being bullied. As The Atlantic’s Eleanor Barkhorn explains, that is “an astounding, alarming, and basically false statistic.” Barkhorn tracked down the origins of the bullying statistic and found that the study behind the number is at least 20 years old and was not directly focused on school bullying. I’m sure the number of kids who get bullied is enormous. But it’s interesting to see how certain statistics emerge, get picked up by the media, and then spread widely until they become part of the fabric of our discourse on a particular topic. I just find this kind of stuff interesting. So many of the stats we accept as fact come from dubious sources. And I’m sure at least 99% of my 44 million NextDraft readers agree.