The Trump Administration and Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have submitted their attention-getting budget request. Consistent with the credo of budget balancers, the proposed allocation reduces the current budget of $68.2 billion by about $9 billion. In keeping with DeVos’s career and reputation, the budget includes a relatively small allotment of $400 million to support school choice for low income children and charter schools. The idea is that this amount would grow in succeeding years and perhaps supersede other approaches to improving education in the United States.

Both facts, the lower amount of funding and the dollars for school choice, highlight concerns raised by DeVos’s detractors. When she was nominated, public education advocates complained that her status as a school choice advocate is at odds with the mission of the Department of Education. If school choice effectively functions as a standing critique of public education as well as being a potential solution to problems evident in the current system, how can public school advocates ever approve of an appointee like Betsy DeVos?

That question leads to others. What is the mission of the Department of Education? And if that mission is defined as advancing public education in the United States in a particular way, then does any elected president have the right to appoint a reformer who may alter the mission or bring a substantially new philosophy of how it might be achieved? Unless we answer those questions in the negative, then we elevate a particular vision of public school education to the level of a substantive right required by the constitution. Worse, we would foreclose any real chance of innovation and reform.