Earlier this month, when President Barack Obama held a press conference to acknowledge U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s intention to step down, I gently chided the White House press corps for showing absolutely no interest in the news of Duncan’s departure or of education policy in general.
(Although, I did note that Obama gave reporters an out, since he addressed other news of the day before opening up the press conference to questions.)
So fairness probably calls for recognition of a report on the “NBC Nightly News” Monday about school testing by the network’s senior White House correspondent, Chris Jansing. The report was tied to the Saturday announcement from the White House and the Education Department urging schools to consider ways to cut back on testing, which Education Week‘s Alyson Klein reported in the Politics K-12 blog.
“Now the Obama administration is saying, ‘Enough,’ calling on schools to cut back testing to no more than 2 percent of classroom time,” Jansing says in her report. “It’s a major reversal, to fix a problem they admit they helped create.”
Since it’s rare for any kind of serious education policy topic to make it onto the commercial networks’ (ABC, CBS, and NBC) evening news shows these days, NBC News gets an A for effort.