If someone told you that $170 million in federal taxpayers’ money was going to fund educational programs that were found to contain inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, would you:

(a) Stop payment immediately?

(b) Dismiss the allegations with the aim of burying them?

(c) Investigate whether the claims were true and address them if they are?

The right answer is the last one. And that’s what we should be doing when it comes to courses that teach the highly combustible subjects of sex education and abstinence.

This latest round in the continuing dispute about what to teach children about sex was initiated by U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is a proponent of comprehensive sex education and a critic of the Bush administration’s preoccupation with teaching only about abstinence.

Waxman’s well-known leftward bias means that his findings are sometimes conveniently dismissed, which is a shame because these are worth exploring. His staff examined 13 of the most commonly used curricula in federally funded programs that teach abstinence only, and found that 11 of them — used by 69 organizations in 25 states — contained unproved claims, subjective conclusions or false statements regarding reproductive health, contraception, abortion and gender.

Like so much else the federal government pays for but does not scrutinize, the content of these programs is not vetted. According to the Waxman report, many errors are more than typographical mistakes; they are subtle attempts to downplay or misrepresent the effectiveness of contraception and overstate the negative consequences of sexual activity and abortion.

This doesn’t call for a stop to funding all these programs, but neither should they be given a free pass. The Department of Health and Human Services, which distributes the growing pot of money for abstinence-only curricula, ought to investigate Waxman’s assertions and demand that real and substantive errors be corrected.

Even Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has asked for a review of these programs.

If preaching abstinence is as powerful and useful as its proponents suggest, why the need to fudge facts and denigrate the alternatives?

The same standards for accuracy ought to be employed to examine the books and manuals used to teach comprehensive sex education, contraception and family planning. The nation’s classrooms cannot be home to false or misleading instruction, period.

They should be home to what works in encouraging teen-agers to prevent pregnancy, view sexuality in a healthy context, and give them the personal tools and social permission to delay sexual activity until they are older or married. Unfortunately, this current dispute obscures the genuine and welcome progress made since the dismal mid-1990s, when teens accounted for about 1 million pregnancies a year.

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the birth rate among girls between the ages of 10 and 14 has fallen to its lowest level in nearly 60 years, an across-the-board decline especially pronounced among blacks. Birth rates among older teens also fell, as did the rate of abortion.

There is no one reason, but many: Better sex education. Increased use of contraceptives. More public discussion about the consequences of sex in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. A reaction to welfare reform.

Abstinence-only programs may have played a role, too, but to give them full credit or to suggest that comprehensive sex education is failing is just plain wrong.

A majority of teens and adults surveyed each year by the bipartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy do not view abstinence-only programs and comprehensive sex education as mutually exclusive choices, but consistently see a role for both in the nation’s classrooms. If only the Bush administration would listen.

After all, even the welcome trend lines do not erase this startling and worrying statistic: The United States still has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world; by one estimate, about 34 percent of teen-age girls get pregnant at least once before turning 20.

No need to sugarcoat that fact. Let’s give children all the information they deserve.