Michael Dobbs gets the task of writing up this story on page three of Thursday's Washington Post. In "Charter Students Fare No Better, Study Says", he writes:

Charter school students across the country are performing no better in math and reading than their peers at regular public schools and by some measures are doing worse, according to a report released yesterday by an independent, congressionally mandated research group.

The survey by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which describes itself as "the nation's report card," showed that 58 percent of fourth-grade students in charter schools performed at a basic level in reading, compared with 62 percent in traditional public schools. When the results were adjusted for race, students at the traditional public schools in the survey still did slightly better, but the margin was deemed "statistically insignificant." Low-income students at regular public schools generally outperformed their charter school counterparts.

The study is perhaps the most authoritative evaluation of charter schools to date. It is politically controversial because the charter school movement was established to provide poor and minority students an alternative to low-performing public schools. Public school advocates pointed to the results as evidence that many charter schools have not lived up to their promise of significantly raising academic achievement.

The Bushies are entirely in favor of any program that can undercut America's public school system, and charter schools do just that. Today, it finally becomes apparent that such schools are not actually better than public schools. Perhaps if the nation put all of the money it spends on such programs into the actual public schools, many of the nation's educational problems would diminish greatly.