John Podesta, President of the Center for American Progress, with an op ed in the Washington Post with a spot-on defense of Obama and Duncan's ed reform plans (I especially like this analogy: "Milbank is wrong on two counts. First, he confuses testing with results. When the Food and Drug Administration fixates on seafood safety in the Gulf of Mexico, we don't call it obsessed with chemical testing. These tests provide the means by which safety can be determined."):

Dana Milbank's best columns for The Post rail against the status quo with a razor-sharp wit. In his Sunday column about our nation's troubled public school systems, however, Milbank argued for the status quo that he usually loves to skewer. In the process, he portrayed President Obama as a bully and the Center for American Progress as detached. He shouldn't have been so glib.

Our school systems are in desperate need of reform. Only 54 percent of African American high school students and 56 percent of Latino high school students graduate. Even students who receive high school diplomas often lack basic academic skills; nearly a third of first-year college students require remediation in math or English. In many major cities, the education crisis is staggering. In Detroit, for example, only 3 percent of economically disadvantaged eighth-graders are proficient in math.

These facts overwhelm Milbank's central premise -- that the president's vision for education reform is driven by an obsession with testing. Milbank is wrong on two counts. First, he confuses testing with results. When the Food and Drug Administration fixates on seafood safety in the Gulf of Mexico, we don't call it obsessed with chemical testing. These tests provide the means by which safety can be determined.

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