Betsy DeVos

If you followed the confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary pick, you are no longer in any doubt why Republicans tried to bury the hearing in the evening and keep it short. Here’s a hearing in which the nominee—who has no experience working or being a student or parent in a public school system—suggested that guns are appropriate in schools because of bears (in response to which a teacher at the school she cited as being threatened by bears said bear spray is enough, no guns needed). Bears, seriously. But no, that wasn’t all.

DeVos, grinning for the cameras, refused to say she would preserve funding for public schools or that she would not work to privatize public education. Because that’s exactly what she plans to do, and she may be a Trump nominee but she’s not quite dishonest enough to openly deny it.

Should states be required to follow the federal law protecting kids with disabilities? Nope. That should be an issue for the states, and if they want to mistreat kids with disabilities, well, so be it. Er, well, actually, turns out, DeVos didn’t even know what the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is, and that federal law does protect students with disabilities. Sen. Maggie Hassan drew a blazingly clear connection between DeVos’ beloved privatization programs and the IDEA:

We do know that children with disabilities in at least some of the voucher programs that you have supported have gone with a voucher to a school, because of their disability had to leave the school. The school keeps the money, and they go back to public schools that now have even less resources to deal with them. And many of us see this as the potential for turning our public schools into warehouses for the most challenging kids with disabilities or other kinds of particular issues. Or the kids whose parents can’t afford to make up the difference between the voucher and the cost of private school tuition.

That is the DeVos plan in a nutshell, though DeVos had been too well coached for this hearing to say it directly. Too bad her coaching didn’t extend to little things like knowing what the law is and that teachers—even in Wyoming—are not generally out using guns to protect their students from bears.

Did Betsy DeVos manage to look even less qualified than Ben Carson? Quite likely yes, and that is a downright terrifying sentence to type.