It is worthy of note when someone from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) criticizes a Democratic U. S. Secretary of Education, even if the latter’s tenure has expired.
Aaron Barlow was actually sharply critical of Obama Administration official Arne Duncan. “Like so many making decisions about education in America, Duncan is besotted by numbers—or massages them, at least, to make predetermined points,” Barlow writes on the academe blog maintained by the AAUP. “He starts his recent article for The Washington Post with two paragraphs celebrating that fourth- and eighth-grade test scores are up—before admitting that twelfth-grade scores are flat.”
“His explanation for this, circular and self-serving, is that high schools have resisted reform.”