Here are two views of Mick Zais, the new Deputy Secretary of Education selected by Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump.

First, from Politico:

“TRUMP TAPS NEW NO. 2 FOR THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT: The president on Tuesday night announced he’s nominating Mick Zais to be deputy secretary at the Education Department. Zais checks off a lot of conservative boxes – as superintendent of schools in South Carolina, he refused to participate in the Obama administration’s signature Race to the Top program, which encouraged states to adopt more rigorous academic standards like the Common Core in exchange for federal grants. Zais saw the standards, which were never mandated by the Obama administration, as federal overreach. He pulled South Carolina out of the Smarter Balanced tests, which are aligned to the Common Core. And he has supported the expansion of school choice programs in the state. Prior to serving as South Carolina’s superintendent, Zais was president of Newberry College for 10 years.”

The Council of Chief State School Officers expressed their approval.

But the grassroots group EdFirstSC were not so complimentary about their state school superintendent. They don’t think much of him.

“How about:

“Since taking office, Zais sent $144 million of our tax dollars to 49 other states, causing thousands of SC teachers to be fired and directly causing class sizes to skyrocket as we made the biggest cuts to education in the US…24.1%. SC test scores on NAEP plummeted over this period of draconian cuts that Zais would now make permanent.

“Since budgets have recovered, Zais has not requested that this funding be restored, even when the state had a billion-dollar surplus. To continue running SC schools on the cheap, he tried desperately to gut regulations limiting class-sizes.

“Zais has poisoned relationships with teachers, attempting to give them letter-grades based on test scores of students they’ve never even met. At a recent State Board meeting, he suggested making teachers at-will employees, to be fired without notice and without showing any cause or due process.

“Zais also took 29 personal days during his first ten months in office. He used those days to go golfing, attend stamp conventions, attend football games, and clean his shed.

“Zais allowed Jay Ragley to lie to the media, claiming that records related to those personal days would cost $500,000 in man-hours to process and provide under a Freedom of Information Act request. It ended up taking a staffer about two hours.

“His department has also conspired to censor and suppress public comment at a series of public meetings on teacher evaluation. At one meeting, staff members were caught taking audience questions into the hallway and stuffing them into a briefcase.

“At another, two senior staff members stood onstage giggling as they sorted questions into those that would and would not be answered. In a two-hour meeting, less than ten minutes were allotted for questions, and none were asked that raised concerns about their plan. That plan was ultimately rejected by the State Board because of serious concerns about its fairness.

“Even those who agree with his goals and radical Libertarian ideology would have to concede that Zais has been singularly ineffective in accomplishing anything of note.

“He runs the same play over and over: develop a plan with no input from stakeholders, keep the public in the dark, fail disastrously when it all comes to light…and then withdraw the plan to duck a vote.”

Usually, a new Secretary of Education selects a Deputy with extraordinary talents or a successful record.

DeVos seems to have chosen someone with more experience than she is (any educator fits that bill) but who is totally ineffectual and leads a low-performing state.

One thing she can count on: he shares her radical libertarian ideology.