The rather snippy attitude of Montana education officials toward yet another national report card is understandable - these self-styled reports, usually coming from within the Washington, D.C., Beltway, arrive with a tiresome regularity.

There's always been something about education that continually creates "experts" who seldom agree.

The latest report card, from the National Council on Teacher Quality, gives Montana mostly failing marks in the areas of teacher evaluation, licensing and training.

A big problem is that the concept of "local control" of public schools is ingrained in Montana, while most of the council's recommended "best practices" involve a top-down, state-controlled approach. For instance, the council flunks any state like Montana that doesn't have strict, across-the-state rules governing teacher evaluations. It seems aghast that Montana allows teachers to be tenured after three years rather than five years, a rather arbitrary stance. It says the state should set up uniform standards for a teacher's classroom preparation. It appears especially upset about exactly how special-education teachers are trained.

Montana Superintendent of Public Education Linda McCulloch said adopting many of the council's recommendations would mean "pitching local control right out the window," adding that the study ignores Montana's high test scores and other student achievements.

Another problem with the report card is its self-satisfied aura of infallibility. In many cases it is unable to find a single state in the nation that is meeting its standards, a situation that raises the question of how necessary those standards really are. We doubt there is only one perfect way to run a school system.

This is not to say that such reports don't offer substantial food for thought, no matter how irksome this second guessing from afar can get. A wade through the 131-page report card on the council's Web site certainly reveals ideas worthy of at least thinking about.

Still, we expect that rather than talking about teacher-related policies, Montanans will quickly return to arguments about the adequacy of overall school funding in the state, a discussion they've become really good at.