Even when research studies come from prestigious universities like Stanford, they can be flawed. That’s the case with data cited in “The $5 billion bet on education,” Al Hunt’s recent New York Times commentary about the Obama Administration’s education agenda and its reliance on less bureaucratic, more accountable public schools known as charters.

A small research unit at Stanford (not the university itself) piloted a methodology pairing virtual twins in charters with students in traditional public education, producing results at odds with most state and national assessments that show far better results. And the longer students are in charters, the better they do.

Obama’s Race to the Top would not be complete without such reforms, but Hunt errors in giving credit to states that have done little to create strong laws that allow for high numbers of high performing charter schools to flourish. The real test will be whether, when state legislators return to work, they will be willing to allow charters to start outside of school board control, free from union contracts and other constraints and funded equitably.

I have good friends in the abstinence movement who make a compelling, statistically sound case for using abstinence over birth control to ensure girls don’t get pregnant. The proponents of “safe sex” have powerful data too. That doesn’t make them right. In fact, objective analysts would say it depends.

I also have friends who believe that drugs, if legalized, would reduce teen dependence. The other side argues well against such “market” arguments. But the drug usage data, like studies of sexual data, do not seem to dictate the practice one way or another.

Now along comes a study about charter schools which the Center for Education Reform finds wholly inadequate and, in fact, flawed on fundamental levels. And such a critique is considered by its authors, promoters, and academic sponsors as somewhat unjust or “partisan”? Huh?

Get over it, folks. Decrying nearly half of all charters as near failures without having studied their actual children, their scores, their prior records or the comparable condition of the school to which they were assigned is, like sex and drugs, emotional and sensory, not fact based.

Great educations aside, this is yet another example of academics being confined to ivory tower thinking and not getting enough reality to inform their methodology.

Or, to use the present analogy, it’s like having sex with instructions from a book and wondering why it didn’t work.

Study it, yes, but for God’s sake, CREDO, get out of yourself and make some clear, grounded time and place conclusions.

Or try abstinence.