Donald Trump’s education secretary deserves a cautious welcome

FOR those looking for encouraging signs about what a Trump administration might accomplish, the nomination of Betsy DeVos as education secretary deserves a cautious welcome. The welcome is because giving parents choice over where their children are educated is a good thing. The caution because there have been enough failures in school reform to suggest that promising ideas can be discredited if done badly.Both Republicans and Democrats suffer from blind spots on education reform. On the left there is a tendency to ignore bad public schools, pander to unions and indulge underperforming teachers. On the right the assumption is often that private is always better and that, once a voucher scheme has been set up, the work of school reform is done. The evidence suggests that what happens in the classroom is at least as important as the structure of the school system. This means recruiting and training teachers who give rigorous lessons and have high expectations of their pupils (see ).