The schoolyard rebel

PERHAPS THE BEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Education, is to see her as she sees herself—an insurgent fighting against a broken public-education industry. “More and more parents are coming to realize their children are suffering at the hands of a system built to strangle any reform, any innovation or any change,” she said in May at a conference held by the American Federation for Children, a conservative advocacy organization that she chaired until recently. “This realization is becoming more evident as the momentum builds for an education revolution.”

At the heart of that revolution, DeVos believes, is a simple idea: parents should be able to use public funds