If anything, President Trump has proven himself be the genius salesmen he claims to be. After all, he sold an entire nation on a particularly foul set of policies and ideologies that disregard everything the country once stood for. Now Betsy DeVos, his Secretary of Education, is similarly trying sell the American people on the idea of privatized education, once again undermining very much of what America was built on.

Under her ideal education system, one run on private education, we would see the emergence of what DeVos and her supporters have coined “school choice”. It is her belief that by increasing the number of privately run but publically funded institutions, competition for students and their money will form between traditional schools and charter schools. This would, theoretically, force both systems of education to improve and would also provide students with a variety of schools to chose from. DeVos believes that education should not be determined by a child’s zip code, but simply by their will to learn. Students would be able to boycott failing government schools and opt to attend private schools. During his candidacy, Trump proposed the use of $20 billion in federal funds toward the creation of a voucher based program to help families pay for private education. This program is one of the staples of DeVos’ argument and her primary method to go about it. Sounds perfect right? How did we get so lucky to find this gem among the scruff of Trump’s cabinet. She is for the people, for the students, and especially for those from low income families.

The current president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, does not quite agree and has previously dubbed Secretary DeVos “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee” and truth is, I cant help but agree with her.

Ideological is perhaps the best word to describe Betsy DeVos with ignorant and oblivious following closely behind.

Born into wealth, it is unlikely that DeVos’ privately educated, privileged gold slipper has ever stepped foot in a public school. Certainly not before her appointment to a position, that very well puts the fate of all public schools in her hands. I imagine that union teachers and public school administrators across the country have fantasy checklists tucked under their pillows. Checklists spilling over with hopes and aspirations, union demands and policy changes, and even a list of requirements for the Secretary of Education, the entity overseeing the entire nations education system. I imagine that Betsy DeVos fails to meet a single requirement on those checklists. DeVos is, in all aspects, devastatingly unqualified to serve the position. She has had her fair share of political experience, if you can call it that because it hardly extends further than her husbands failed run for governor and the massive donations she makes to the republican party. It certainly does not come close to education.

So is it any wonder that what Betsy DeVos is proposing, happens to be far from healthy competition? It would be a massacre, one that could irradiate public education entirely. Along with her open support of groups adamantly hoping to funnel students out of public schools and into expensive private institutions, she has also personally fought to irrigate tax payer money from public schools to charter schools. Her idea of competition happens to leech much needed resources from public schools and the students that go there. Michigan, her home court, has largely been the forefront of her efforts and because among others, she fought to keep private schools free of regulations and standards, the state has a startlingly high number of low performing charter schools. Despite this blatant lack of success, DeVos still pines for her ideological education system. Her bid to privatize the education system, though seemingly pleasant, would have massively negative repercussion. For one it would strip education based unions of power, subsequently crumpling a very tried and true American system.  force many into paying extremely high tuition fees, and ultimately do exactly the opposite of her championed theme of “school choice.” No doubt many public schools, unable to compete with their private counterparts, would not only lose resources but shut down entirely as well. Locales in which the public school has shut down would then have no choice but to pay for the nearest private institution. Not to mention the very important detail that any vouchers would be based on application. If the application is anything like current government aid, it would bottleneck and strangle lower to upper middle class families that might make just a little too much to qualify and too little to afford a charter school. So unfortunately, despite her job description outlying a responsibility to all students, Betsy DeVos is no gem among the rough.

Thursday during her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, DeVos said the following:

“I’m Betsy DeVos. You may have heard some of the ‘wonderful’ things the mainstream media has called me lately,”…“I, however, pride myself on being called a mother, a grandmother, a life partner, and perhaps the first person to tell Bernie Sanders to his face that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

This is precisely why DeVos is just as terrifying of a monster as Trump because just like him she is dangerously ignorant, especially to the real state of education in America. The sad truth is that around 31 million American students are dependent on that “free lunch,” a meal that is quite possibly the only thing they will eat that day. You would be hard pressed to find free lunch among many of other services provided by public education systems, in a private education model. Charter schools and private education through all the gallantry are for-profit institutions and this is a freighting attribute for the nations main education system to have. Public education is a responsibility that our government upholds, one that private education is not bound to. Betsy DeVos, ideological and delusional to the core, is just another character that fits right in with the rest of our ridiculous presidential cabinet.