One can’t help but continue to be horrified by the pronouncements and appointments of Donald Trump.

Take his choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. DeVos is basically a politician, not an educator, who believes that a market model — read privatization — of America’s public schools is needed. DeVos is an advocate for school choice and vouchers. She is not a teacher, principal or even school board member that I could tell. Yet she will be the number one educator of our country.

This reflects a certain level of arrogance that one does not need to believe in public education or even have a certain level of expertise as long as one has a MBA frame of mind to make it all efficient and achieve its goals. While I am all for efficiency — I run a business and have to be economically efficient in order to survive — this efficiency approach to education will result in cut after cut after cut until public education has been dummied down to its lowest common denominator i.e. the basic skills needed to enter the workforce. Or in the case of UW-Madison, try to make a premier educational institution into a sophisticated voc-tech school.