Teachers who teach children with multiple disabilities and children who are homeless may think that they have a tough job, but consider what a very hard time Betsy DeVos had in her first week as Secretary of Education, very likely the first paying job she has ever held. She visited a public middle school in D.C., where protestors harassed her and tried to keep her out. When she eventually entered the school, she said nice things to the staff, but after she left she insulted them as being in a “receive” mode. She gave a few interviews and said she hoped to launch more charter schools, more vouchers, more cybercharters, and presumably shrink the number of public schools as she opens up opportunities for students to go anywhere other than public schools.

In one interview, she told syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas that she did not think the protests against her were spontaneous. The implication was that those evil teachers’ unions had plotted against her. The other implication was that parents and teachers would welcome her noble presence in their public school, even though she was unimpressed with what she saw. Someone, she said, was trying to make her life “a living hell.” No matter what the plotters do, she pledged she would not be deterred from her mission of “helping kids in this country,” by enabling them to leave public schools for privatized alternatives.

She suggested to Thomas that it might be a good idea to bring tens of thousands of children to the Capitol to demonstrate for charters and vouchers. She said it had worked in Florida. Of course, this is now a standard part of the privatization script, using children as political pawns to demand more public funding for private choices, thus disabling public schools by diminishing their resources.

She pledged to support alternatives to public schools, without citing a scintilla of evidence that these choices would help kids and without acknowledging that the proliferation of choices harms the great majority of children who don’t choose to leave public schools. Her mindset is purely ideological. She did not offer any suggestions about how to help the vast majority of children who attend public schools. She has one idea, and she is sticking to it: choice. The absence of evidence for that one idea from her home state never comes up. Michigan has tumbled in national rankings as choice has expanded.

When Cal Thomas asked what could be done for children who had an “absent father,” she responded that this problem has to be addressed at the classroom level. “It’s not an easy or a single answer, but again it goes back to having the power to influence those things at the classroom level.” It is not clear what she meant or if she herself knew what she meant. How is the teacher in the classroom prepared to make up for an absent father? Is this what passes for profundity?

Then there was this very interesting exchange, in which Cal Thomas and Betsy DeVos exposed their deepest beliefs:

“Q. Throughout most of the public school system, which began in the late 19th century and flourished in the 20th, education included values, McGuffey Readers and even prayer and Bible reading, until the Supreme Court outlawed both in the ‘60s. Do you see a correlation between the loss of American values, a sense of morality, a concept of the transcendent, right and wrong, objective truth that have been banished in our relativistic age and lack of achievement in some places in our schools?

“A. I think it’s a significant factor. Many of the schools I’ve seen, especially the charters, have a focus on character development and again the whole child development. That’s one of the reasons parents are choosing alternatives like this.”

To begin with, public education got its start in the mid-nineteenth century, not the late nineteenth century.

I am one of the few living Americans who has actually read the entirety of the McGuffey readers. Children today would find them dull, simplistic, and obsolete.

The assumption that public schools lack values because they do not have Bible readings and prayers is nonsense. When I went to public schools in Houston in the 1940s and 1950s, we had daily Bible readings and prayers, but the schools were racially segregated. Few teachers had more than a bachelor’s degree. I would say without question that our public schools today have better quailed teachers today and a stronger value system than they did when we read the Bible and prayed every day. As a Jew in a Christian public school system, I ignored the implicit proselytizing, but from the perspective of the decades, I can say that our schools then did not practice what they preached. We never discussed current social or political issues. Too controversial. We were not well prepared for the real problems of our society.

The values of the dominant religion were imposed on me but I never had any wish to impose mine on anyone else.

Now, as we live in a religiously and culturally diverse society, Thomas and DeVos sound like two antiquarians. They want to turn the clock back 100 years, maybe two hundred years.

There is nothing innovative about DeVos’ ideas. She has lived in a billionaire bubble all her life, surrounded by her like-minded kith and kin of rich white Republican evangelicals. She has nothing to teach our teachers or students. She knows nothing about how to improve public schools. Her beloved charters, vouchers, and cybercharters have not proven to be better than public schools, and in many states, are demonstrably worse than traditional public schools with certified teachers.

We live in a big, ever-changing world, and it is far too late to go back to 1920 or 1820, no matter how devoutly DeVos would like to restore the suprenpmacy of whites and evangelical Christians. They too must learn to live and let live.