WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has a neat little rhetorical trick he uses when faced with criticism of the Obama administration’s educational policies: He dismisses the critics and their concerns as “silly.”

Duncan seems to prefer that adjective whenever he’s asked to respond to criticism of the Common Core experiment that’s underway in some 45 states.

The nation’s top education chief has even started characterizing criticism of the administration’s proposed college rating system – which would link student aid to a college or university’s track record of student success – as “more than a little silly.”

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One person who has had enough of Duncan’s condescending ways is Trinity Washington University President Patricia McGuire. In a recent Huffington Post column, McGuire wonders if it’s possible for any American to “have a serious difference of opinion with the secretary without being dismissed as silly?”

McGuire doesn’t stop there, though.

She also knocks Duncan’s Education Department for its arrogant decision to “hold just four one-day hearings” about the administration’s college rating proposal “at public university campuses around the country where people who wanted to make comments would get five minutes to do so.”

McGuire writes:

“This is a cynical way to block thoughtful participation in the regulatory process. The proposals are serious and complicated, requiring far more than a cursory five minutes of analysis. This administration has a huge credibility problem these days; saying it wants input but then providing only the most superficial input method adds to the perception that there’s no real interest in sincere dialogue and exploration of any ideas other than those the administration already proposes.”

After systematically picking apart the flaws in the administration’s college rating proposal, McGuire offers this wish:

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“I harbor a weird fantasy that the problems the administration is experiencing with the Affordable Care Act implementation will actually lead to a more rational, less arrogant, indeed, more humble government, one that might actually be willing to listen to people who know something about the industries, institutions and people they are trying to re-engineer.

“I have this dream that those of us who have worked in the trenches of institutional reform might actually be asked how we make reform work, how we achieved results that stick.

“I keep hoping that our leaders will not drive out the good in their quest to create some kind of perfect world according to their own vision — a vision often informed only by other elites like themselves, or major philanthropists, unenlightened by the real lived experience of us lesser lights who are mere practitioners of the educational arts. Silly me.”