Eduwonk lets the New York Times off a bit easy here, about their latest charter-schools piece.

Now, it’s true that the Times scaled back their planned hit piece on charters — I suspect, in no small part because The Post called their bluff before they could write it.

Nevertheless, the Times still does its worst to distort the facts. I’ll let The Post’s editorial speak for itself as to the importance of the recent DOE report on our understanding of how charter schools are doing — basically, the report is from a handful of states, is based on old data and doesn’t compare apples to apples.

So, what are the problems with the Times piece?

For one, there’s its absolutely remarkable recap of this August’s union-planted, discredited, front-page slime job on charter schools, as such:

The [recent] study follows several recent efforts to track charter performance, including a report by the American Federation of Teachers, which showed students in charter schools lagging behind their public school peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Advocates of charter schools, including Education Secretary Rod Paige, criticized that report for generalizing about charter schools, which offer extremely varied educational programs in states from Massachusetts to Oregon.

That’s an exceedingly odd way of saying, “We pulled a fast one on you in August by not admitting what even the union’s report had to admit: All differences between charter schools and other public schools disappeared when you accounted for the fact that charter schools take more poor and minority students.”

But, we can’t expect honesty from the Times on education policy, now can we?

And then, the Times finally gets around to reporting a months-old, extraordinarily thorough study, by a Harvard education economist, showing that charter schools are improving kids’ test scores — and pretty significantly, at that.

Well, I’m glad they finally got that one out there — even if they did it by burying it in another story.

Note to Times readers: They are lying to you when it comes to education. Read the Washington Post, The New York Post or Eduwonk when you want to know the truth on the subject.