The Senate’s historic vote this week, to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee, Betsy DeVos, as his secretary of education, has set the stage for abandonment of the very idea of public education.

It was historic because Vice President Mike Pence had to cast a vote to break the 50-50 tie. It had not been done before in a cabinet level nomination, according to the Senate historian. Now, the U.S. has a secretary of education who has no experience in administering a school of any kind, including entry-level teaching, and who has been in the forefront of the effort of fellow billionaires and the lesser rich to defund public education and turn the money over to the likes of charter schools and a voucher system.

As far as intent to “reform” public education, the Senate might just as well have voted to confirm a candidate summoned off the street. DeVos has been an advocate of privatization of education for many years, but that effort on her part seems to be a long-standing goal that is more ideology, rather than sound educational principle and policy. After all, Republicans, in general, have promoted privatization of everything that it’s possible to privatize in government at all levels.

Having served as chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Committee for several years, she was in a position to influence the party to encourage and promote privatization of education. And her wealth didn’t hurt that effort. She’s a billionaire in a family of the same stripe and she married into a family that also is worth billions. Her father, Edgar Prince, is the founder of Prince Corporation, which he sold for a reported $1.35 billion, and her brother Erik Prince is the founder of Blackwater, the mercenary company that has relieved the U.S. government of some of its military responsibility…for a price, of course. DeVos married into the family that founded Amway, a worldwide corporation that is worth billions. Amway and Blackwater have become the same corporations by other names, but they are still referred to by their detractors by the original names.

While DeVos and many other proponents of charter and other private schools and the voucher systems consider themselves to be educational “reformers,” it has been difficult to find a real fundamental policy or set of policies that they would define as reform. Again, it appears that their idea of reform is merely privatization. It has been so profitable for them in other areas of the life of the nation that setting up for-profit corporations to provide government services that education is just another in a long line of enterprises that can bring in taxpayer money by the billions.

Charter schools are “public schools,” in that they use taxpayer money from the local district, but do not answer to the local school board or other entity in any meaningful way. The result is that money is taken from the public schools and their programs and is lost to the children that attend the public schools. Voucher systems work in pretty much the same way: parents are given vouchers and they are free to choose charters or other schools, many of which are for-profit corporations. That voucher money is lost to the districts for the public schools and the children who attend.

The charter schools also are allowed to weed out children who have learning or behavioral problems or are disabled in some other way and send them back to the public schools to teach, with the reality that they will have reduced funds to do so, because of the charters that have taken money from the district’s budget. And, they are allowed to be union-free, for the most part. A few have teachers’ unions, but most can deal with their teachers as any other employer can deal with workers, therefore, many teachers (young and idealistic) are burned out in a year, or two. It’s not a healthy situation for the teachers or the children.

During her confirmation hearing, DeVos was asked if she had any experience as a teacher, administrator, or educator of any kind. She responded that she had none, but she did serve as a mentor, but did not say what kind of mentoring or how long she did it. She was confirmed and usually described by the press as a “school choice” activist, thus masking her ultimate goal to fully privatize education. As the secretary of education, DeVos said she whould divest herself of her interests in the private school corporations that will benefit from her actions as secretary. Donald Trump, in a tweet, described her as a “reformer, and she is going to be a great education secretary for our kids.” He deals mostly in hyperbole and, if he really wanted to cite champions of children, he could have cited Marion Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, but that would be too liberal, especially since there is not great wealth to be attained from such non-profits.

Both Republicans who voted against DeVos’ confirmation, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine indicated that they were fearful that the nominee’s concentration on charter and private schools would possibly harm the public schools in their remote districts, draining their resources.

Walter C. Farrell Jr., an expert on education privatization and a BlackCommentator.com columnist, last month, described DeVos in this way: “She does not factor addressing poverty into any of the necessities for effective public education because she basically believes it does not matter. During her thirty-year crusade to eradicate K-12 public education, she has contributed more than a billion dollars to a variety of anti-public education advocates, politicians, grassroots leaders, clergy, and others. DeVos and her Cartel colleagues have also individually and collectively funded these initiatives throughout the country. She has been aided by the last four U.S. Education Secretaries in Republican and Democratic administrations whom she had directly and/or indirectly financed in their previous positions.”

DeVos is in good company, since Bill Gates is another billionaire who promotes charter schools. He supported a law in Washington State to allow charter schools in 2012, but the law was ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court in September 2015, on the basis that public money can be used only for “common schools,” which charters are not, since they are not governed by an elected school board, but only by the appointed board of the private school. Often, the decision-making entity is a corporation that may not even be located in the same state, let alone the local school district.

Gates and, presumably, many other “educational philanthropists,” believe that a good teacher is enough for children to learn and thrive educationally. He thinks that is true in both the U.S. and in other countries. But neither he nor other such philanthropists give any thought to poverty. A five-star teacher is not going to be effective teaching children who are often hungry or hungry much of the time. Relieving poverty comes first, and then comes education, which may keep the child out of poverty for a lifetime. Relieving poverty is a touchy subject among the rich and their Corporate America and the reason is that eliminating poverty means a wider dispersion of the wealth of the country. They will have none of that. Otherwise, they would not be hiding money in other countries so they don’t have to pay taxes, or they are spending untold millions lobbying in each session of congress to lower their taxes or create more loopholes that work in their favor.

The U.S. now has a president who doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of the use of power (or even how that power could or should be used), so why would anyone be surprised by a secretary of education who does not understand a century of American public education or how difficult it was to make it a right for even the poorest and marginalized? It is very likely that DeVos will be a disaster for the education (or miseducation) of American children, but it remains to be seen how that will play out. One thing for sure is that she is only one part of the massive effort of the rich and powerful to privatize government services at every turn. How much of it can they consume? It will take an educated populace to make that determination, especially a politically and financially educated people. Then it will take action.