The most bizarre debate of this General Assembly session came in the House this week over legislation designed to raise the state's cap on charter schools without really raising it.

Nobody seemed especially happy with the proposal, designed the to improve the state's chances to receive money from the federal government as part of the Race to the Top program, though it's far from clear that the cap is the reason the state missed out on the first round of awards that went to Delaware and Tennessee.

Tennessee also has a cap on the number of charter schools and when it was raised last year the state included many restrictions on new charters and a national pro-charter group gave Tennessee's charter school law a D, ranking it the 27th of the 40 states with charter laws. States with more permissive charter laws than North Carolina didn't receive money either.

But Governor Beverly Perdue requested the legislation anyway, determined to tweak North Carolina's application for the next round of awards and to respond to the perception created by the overhyped claims of pro-charter and pro-voucher advocates that the cap was the problem.

Many of the loudest demands to lift the cap to please the federal government came from conservative Republicans who rail every day about states' rights and the oppressive government in Washington that many of them believe should have no role at all in education.

But they are more than happy now to use the federal government they loathe to serve their ideological purposes.

The bill itself lays out four ways that local school officials can handle chronically low performing schools with the approval of the State Board of Education. Three of the options, including closing the schools, are permitted under current law.

The new provision would allow local districts to turn over schools to an outside operator to run under the same regulations that now govern charter schools. But unlike existing charters, the schools would come under the authority of the local school board and the school employees would remain employees of the school system.

The heated house discussion quickly became simply a debate about charter schools, as amendments were offered to increase the cap despite the fact that the House passed legislation last year to increase it by six schools. The Senate has yet to consider the bill.

Most disturbingly, it comes despite no evidence that charter schools have lived up to their original promise to provide laboratories to develop innovations that can be transferred to traditional public schools.

And despite the repeated claims made in the House debate and at frequent press conferences, the performance of charters in North Carolina and around the country is mixed at best.

The largest national study, conducted last year at Stanford University and funded by pro-charter foundations, found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains significantly better than traditional public schools, 37 percent showed gains that were worse, and 46 percent were about the same. The study looked specifically at North Carolina and found similarly mixed results.

There is simply no hard evidence that charters work. But that hasn't stopped the advocates, many of whom have turned the issue into a stalking horse for their ultimate aim of privatizing public schools with vouchers and tax credits.

They ought to listen to longtime charter advocate and national education scholar Diane Ravitch, who worked in the administration of the first President Bush and advised Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Ravitch has changed her mind and now believes that charters do more harm than good, many times siphoning off better students with parents who are more involved, leaving the traditional public schools with the children who are hardest to educate.

And that's what it ought to be about, educating all the students, not needlessly fudging an application for money to the federal government, and certainly not pursuing an ideological crusade to privatize our most important public institution.