Letting taxpayers keep their money and use it for the things they need is the most efficient way to get the economy moving again. Throwing their dollars at public schools, in contrast, is just tossing them down a hole.

Of course, the U.S. News rankings are not the sole, all-encompassing method to find the college that's just right for you. It is important to also look at other factors, and competing guides such as those put out by Forbes, the Princeton Review, Newsweek and others.

These guides show, however, that when it comes to higher education — in stark contrast to our dreadful elementary and secondary system — it's the needs of the students, not schools or bureaucrats, that come first.

Here are two more quirky questions. The pollsters asked which presidential candidate has the "strongest desire to strengthen public schools." Based at least on his proposing to spend additional billions on public schools — which, contrary to some spin in the poll, are quite well funded — Senator Obama should certainly win this one, and he does, 46 percent to 29 percent. PDK also asked which candidate respondents would trust more to address racial achievement gaps, promote parental choice, support education research, and fund education. Again, Obama won. None of these questions, though, hit the important point: Who would be best for education. Many in the media, though, will report these results as if they'd done exactly that.

There's a lot more of note in the poll — from dissatisfaction with No Child Left Behind to wasted senior years — but the unifier is this: How you ask the questions is at least as important as the answers that you get.

In the end, we can't say anything definitive about NCLB, either with state tests or NAEP. The trends on the more politically insulated, national assessment, however, are nonetheless fairly clear: things got worse after the law was passed.

There's a huge and disgusting irony to this. Federal politicians constantly declare themselves defenders of the poor and politically weak, and they're happy to violate clear Constitutional barriers against federal intervention in education by throwing billions of dollars at demonstrably failed, bureaucratic sink holes like Title I. In contrast, when it comes to an education program that gives the poor real power and is well within constitutional bounds because the feds have jurisdiction over DC, they can't kill it fast enough. Why? Because their primary concern is all too often not helping kids, but to currying favor with powerful interest groups like teachers unions and school administrators associations whose members earn their living from the decrepit, monopolistic, status quo.

According to the Institute of Education Sciences report, on reading, kids lucky enough to win voucher lotteries almost certainly outperformed those who wanted vouchers but lost, and voucher winners probably did about the same or a little better on math. It's pretty much what one would expect from an evaluation of limited school choice: strong evidence that choice helps the students who can get it, no evidence it hurts, and one less excuse for not extending choice to all children.