A lot of people in the Donald Trump administration had qualifications so questionable that they had us wondering, “What are they doing there?” That question was especially loud when it came to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. In case you don’t recall, DeVos had no background whatsoever in education and no real concept of what her department was supposed to do. In an administration that didn’t even begin to meet Trump’s promise of having “the best people,” DeVos was certainly one of the worst.
The closest thing she had to a qualification for the post was her past as a champion for charter schools. Specifically, her work with Michigan’s charter school system—an enterprise that, according to those on the ground in Michigan, is an unmitigated disaster. Back in 2016, Detroit Free Press editorial page editor Stephen Henderson raked DeVos over the coals for creating a system of charter schools where woefully inadequate performance actually gets rewarded. Henderson also revealed that for all their hype, charter schools in Detroit do only marginally better than their traditional public counterparts. Granted, DeVos didn’t create the system—Clinton, Bush, and Obama all supported charter schools before Trump, so that says something. However, some questionable examples have put charter schools under even more of a microscope.