Mayor Francis Slay used the suspension of a St. Louis charter school to take another dig at one of his most frequent targets of ire — the city school district.

The Can! Academies, located in northwest St. Louis near I-70 and Goodfellow Boulevard, was closed for at least a year today by the State Board of Education.

Can was supposed to help students who had dropped out of other public schools attain their GED. Instead, as education scribe David Hunn writes in today’s paper, they were playing cards and watching movies.

Slay, like other advocates of school choice, says the Can situation actually represents a strength of the charter schools system: The ones that don’t work can be closed with relative ease.

That’s something that can’t be said for conventional public schools.

“If a charter school isn’t a better choice for its students and their parents than the St. Louis public school district, then the charter school shouldn’t operate,” Slay wrote today on his Web site. “On the other hand, the St. Louis public school district has struggled unsuccessfully for years to find ways to re-involve more of its drop-outs in career preparation.”