YOU SUCK, BULLOCK, the headline blared.

Okay, I'm paraphrasing. What actually greeted my eyes in the Sunday paper was the much less personal:"Arne Duncan on Milwaukee's chronic woes: 'A national disgrace.'"

He wasn't talking about the real national disgrace, of course, which is this country's abysmal shame of how it treats the poor and minorities even today. He was talking about Milwaukee's schools. And as a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher, it's hard not to take such criticisms personally. Journal Sentinel columnist Alan Borsuk, who got that quote from former US Secretary of Education Duncan, lays out some evidence.

"The percentage of students who can read and do math at levels considered proficient or better is low," Borsuk writes of MPS. "The percentage who score at levels considered "below basic," the lowest category, is shockingly high. The racial gaps are large, almost certainly once again among the biggest in the country."

I'm not saying this isn't disgraceful, and I'm also not saying Duncan should have fixed 400 years of racial history in his seven years as education secretary. But I am saying Arne Duncan probably shouldn't be throwing stones from his glass house.

Here are five other national disgraces Duncan had a hand in that he should be worried about first.

1. Alarmingly (but artificially!) low test scores

I'm not going to rehash the whole argument here, but Duncan's brainchild, the Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative, encouraged states, including Wisconsin, to raise the bar for what counts as "proficient" on a test in the first place. Wisconsin test results released a couple of weeks ago show that only about half of our students at all grade levels are proficient or advanced in reading or math. This is much lower than the rates we used to see under the old system here.

The changed scores were sold to us as a way to make results more honest, more accurately reflective of our students' actual performance. But do you really honestly believe that one out of every two of the kids you know or see playing in the street can't read at grade level?

In fact, the results have been used to create alarm, panic and calls for "reform" where reform is not necessarily necessary. Consider the brief flurry of panic that surrounded the release of Wisconsin's class of 2016 ACT results, where the state dropped from an average of 22.2 for 2015 (of a possible 36) to an even 20.

The drop was fully expected, considering that the class of 2016 is the first one where every student took the test; previously, most Wisconsin high schools had only the college-bound take the test, which is, after all, a college entrance exam. While the wildest claims – like the drop being evidence of Governor Scott Walker's abuse of the public school system – were quickly abandoned or deemed false, plenty of districts around the state are now saying, "Looks like we have work to do!" when we know their students graduate just fine.

Districts all over the country said the same thing a few years back when the switch to Duncan's preferred test scores was made. Panic: that's a big part of Duncan's legacy. Panic that leads not only to demands for "reform," but also hasty spending to solve imaginary problems.

2. The waste of public money on private enterprise: testing

When districts look for "help" to alleviate their panic, where will they turn? Undoubtedly to one of the several large education-publishing companies, like Pearson or McGraw Hill. They make the tests, and they write the textbooks students need to pass the tests.

These companies, which spend millions a year to lobby politicians in states and Washington alike, are incredibly profitable – with much of that profit coming from tax dollars. One key component of Duncan's Race to the Top was to ensure that there was even more testing than demanded under No Child Left Behind. Never mind that RTTT encouraged states to adopt the Common Core State Standards – which is fine, I support that myself – and then required them to buy newly designed tests to match; the real evil was Race to the Top’s Early Learning Challenge.

The RTTT-ELC grant application process required states to develop programs that would measure "outcomes and progress through the collection, organization and understanding of evidence," according to the Department of Education website, and implement "comprehensive data systems and using data to improve instruction, practices, services and policies." That's not-so-veiled code for testing, and testing of students in the earliest grades – even kindergarten or pre-K.

A real and vital component of Duncan's legacy in charge of this country's public education is money out of our pockets (and students' classrooms) into the pockets of shareholders.

3. The waste of public money on private enterprise: charters

The Race to the Top explicitly also called for states to raise or eliminate entirely its caps on how many students enrolled in charter schools. Like educational publishing, the charter school business is a big one for Wall Street, not only because many charter schools are operated by for-profit companies (not all, and not that many in Wisconsin or Milwaukee), but also because investment in charter schools can offer a hefty tax break.

In addition to the lobbying done by publishers for Duncan's expansion of the national testing regime, there has been plenty of lobbying done by powerful groups. I'm talking groups like Democrats for Educational Reform, backed by nominally liberal hedge fund investors or other Wall Street types, who see charter schools as win-win: They think student achievement will improve (it mostly doesn't, studies show) and there's a financial return on their investment.

Again, this "return" comes directly out of the tax money we put into our schools. During Duncan's tenure at the U.S. Department of Education, charter school enrollment rose by 70 percent, with millions going into what the Center for Media and Democracy called a "black hole" of unaccountable private charter operators. Duncan's legacy includes billions of tax dollars spent on charter schools.

4. Shrinking school budgets

I give Duncan credit for helping to get schools into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, known colloquially as President Obama's 2009 stimulus package. The funds funneled to states and districts through the stimulus helped schools get through the leanest of the Great Recession lean years.

Since then, though, what's happened to public school budgets? They've been falling precipitously. I won't blame Duncan for the Republican Congress that regularly failed to allocate the full amount of K-12 spending that Obama asked for in his submitted budgets. But note that in the time that K-12 spending has been falling, Duncan continued to direct larger pieces of this shrinking pie to charter schools.

This includes more than $150 million to charters Duncan dispensed on his way out the door. This money didn't come on top of what was sent by the feds to traditional public schools, but rather it was sent to charters instead of to traditional public schools.

With many states still not spending as much on K-12 as they were pre-recession, federal money is an important source of income for our schools. Duncan's legacy is to redirect those funds away from schools that need it most.

5. Chicago

Arne Duncan came to President Obama's cabinet from Chicago, where he was head of the public schools there. What's Duncan's legacy? I think we all know the mess the Chicago Public Schools has been in lately, but before that, it wasn't any better.

Duncan spent his time at CPS, according to the Washington Post in 2009, "jettisoning staff, hiring turnaround specialists, shutting down (schools) deemed beyond hope. He pushed a back-to-basics curriculum, spawned dozens of charter schools and experimented with performance pay. State and federal test scores and graduation rates rose on his watch, and Chicago became a laboratory for innovation." A lot of the same things he brought to Race to the Top, in other words.

But did that work? In a word, no.

The Post notes, "Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years. ... Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education." The rising test scores were attributed to a relaxing of Illinois' state testing requirements.

Though Duncan called what he did in Chicago a "model of reform," he has never owned up to the fact that such reform largely failed.

I don't want to defend the status quo in Milwaukee as the end-all and be-all of what public education ought to be. I am not satisfied with our achievement, either, which is why I still go to work hungry every day, support (and occasionally help lead) worthwhile district reform efforts, advocate for the district every chance I get and promote the hell out of what MPS does well despite its challenges.

But what Duncan wants, what the Republicans in Madison have long wanted, what this city's private school voucher advocates have gotten, and what – I'm afraid – even Alan Borsuk wants, is the "reform" Duncan provided in Chicago. Sound and fury signifying nothing. Change for the sake of change. "Disruption," as they say in Silicon Valley.

Look at those (artificially) terrible results, they say, and then they demand we essentially abandon the public schools – siphoning money to private companies and charter schools, cutting budgets, propping up reform ideas that haven't been proven to work.

What we really need is a belief that our public schools not only should do better, but can do better with better support. Only a very superficial reading of Duncan's legacy would show anything like that. How is that not a national disgrace?