According to
this article, the admin's Education Department released a bunch of educational testing data known as "the nation's report card" but didn't bother to analyze the data relating to the performance of charter schools. Turns out that students in those schools appear to be doing worse than students in similarly situated public schools.
The No Child Left Behind Act cited charter schools as one remedy for the multifaceted ills of our nation's educational system, so I was less than surprised to read that it wasn't the admin who first pointed out these disappointing test scores. In fact the admin didn't even publicize that such data was available until it was asked by a nonprofit to do an analysis.
I guess on the bright side this time the failure was blamed on "poor publicity" instead of a printing deadline.
I find myself in a strange posture on this particular snafu because I support the charter school concept. But I just don't get how we are supposed to have confidence in the admin's policymaking when its efforts at empirical analysis are so driven by ideology. (
See also the suppressed Medicare bill cost projections.)
