OMB Watch has been trying for the past year or so to connect the dots to expose the farce that is the administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Here's another great example: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was reviewed under the PART survey in 2003 and given the highest rating of "effective." Some excerpts from the PART survey itself:

• [NCES] makes a unique contribution to knowledge about the conditions and outcomes of education in America.
• Educational administrators, researchers, and policymakers report high levels of customer satisfaction with the comprehensiveness and utility of program publications and services.

Despite this rating, the President has proposed cuts to funding for NCES each year since the review of the program was conducted. If the president has repeatedly said his administration is going to focus on spending government revenue wisely and only on programs proven to work, and his own evaluation tool finds that NCES is performing admirably, why would he want to elimiate it? Aside from the demonstrated bias against the Department of Education within PART reviews, a partial answer to that question may have come last week from a new study released by none other than the NCES. The study was a comparison of fourth grade student performance in 2003 between students enrolled in charter schools and students enrolled in public schools. In short, the study found that the public schools, on average, were performing better than charter schools. This report left me wondering not about whether charter schools are a good idea (full disclosure: my wife is a public charter school teacher in Washington, DC), but whether the Bush administration sees the NCES as a threat to one of their highest policy priorities: promoting school choice. The more we delve into the PART, the more evidence we find that even the Bush administration doesn't believe the PART is an unbiased evaluative tool. It's simply another way for them to advance an agenda - but only when it is convenient. When it isn't convenient, they will just ignore it.