If you wanted to produce a parody of a bad nominee for President Trump's cabinet, you would be hard pressed to come up with one more outlandish than Betsy DeVos, our new secretary of education.
She's a hyperbolic prototype for other Trump nominees who are clearly being rewarded for loyalty (Jeff Sessions), who are unqualified (Ben Carson) or who have been put in charge of departments that they don't understand (Rick Perry).
DeVos's Senate confirmation hearing wasn't reassuring: she didn't demonstrate much knowledge about important educational issues, and she refused to commit to holding charter schools to the same accountability standards that traditional public schools face.
And her answer to a question about guns in schools bears repeating: channeling Sarah Palin, she said that some schools in Wyoming might need guns to fend off "potential grizzlies." She may have been attempting a joke.
Further, DeVos has no experience with public schools, either as a student, teacher or administrator. On the contrary, in Michigan she has devoted considerable energy and money to diverting resources away from public schools to private and for-profit charter schools. The results of her efforts there haven't been promising.
DeVos's qualifications to serve as secretary of education are so weak that two Republican senators declined to vote for her. Vice President Mike Pence came off the bench to cast the deciding vote in her favor, 51-50.
Fortunately, the damage that DeVos is able to inflict on public schools may be limited. The department of education is a small, low-budget entity, and we generally favor local control of public schools. Nevertheless, her confirmation provides a boost for pro-voucher initiatives in the states.
These efforts are usually couched in concern for disadvantaged students trapped in reputedly poor-performing public schools, but the most obvious beneficiaries of full-blown voucher programs are families who already have enough money to send their children to private schools.
Let's face it: the DeVos nomination had much more to do with politics than with education. One of our major political parties has made a living out of convincing us that the nation is incapable of public action for communal good and that all of the answers are to be found in free enterprise and competition.
But the nation as a whole, as well as local governmental entities, does a much better job of meeting public needs than Republicans are willing to admit. We manage to defend our country, police our streets, put out fires and, usually, drink out of any water tap in the country with confidence.
These public services have the effect of bringing us together and reminding us that every citizen has a right to equal treatment. Whether you're rich or poor, you can scribble an address on an envelope, apply a stamp, drop it in a mailbox and be assured that within a couple of days it will be delivered to any address in America, no matter how remote, with remarkable accuracy. (The incompetence of the U.S. Postal Service is a tendentious myth.)
These services aren't meant to be profit centers; we maintain them in order to support and promote the wellbeing of the republic. Public schools are in this category, and it strengthens the nation when we commit to providing a quality education in equivalent facilities to every American child.
And it strengthens the nation even more when we actually do this. We've always known how to provide a good public education, and in our best-resourced neighborhoods we've always managed to do so. The challenge is to do it for every child.
That challenge will not be overcome, however, by taking resources away from public schools. Private schools and for-profit charters tend to divide, rather than unite, the nation. Good public schools provide a common experience and send a message that lets every child know that she has been born into a society that cares about what happens to her.
Betsy DeVos is a cynical choice for secretary of education; let's hope that she doesn't do too much to undermine public schools.