President-Elect Donald Trump has made a number of strange choices for his cabinet, but in terms of the achievement of a particular goal, one appointment stands out as near perfect: Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.

DeVos is a member of the so-called Republican donor class. Her vast wealth — she was born into money and her father-in-law founded the multi-level marketing scheme, Amway — is at odds with Trump’s efforts to curry support among the working class. And she has no direct experience with education, such as teaching in a classroom or administering a school.

Her essential connection to education is her persistent effort to move public money away from public education and into the hands of parents who want to send their children to private schools or charter schools.

Trump himself has never demonstrated much personal interest in education. Evidently he reads very little and he is intellectually incurious. Facts and data aren’t as important to him as passion and rhetoric.

But despite his lack of interest in education, in Betsy DeVos Trump finds a quality that will serve him well as his education secretary, her devotion to the narrative that public schools — like everything else in America — are an abysmal failure and that the failure can be fixed only by diverting the money that supports them to private schools and charter schools.

The premise, however, is an overstatement. This Atlantic Monthly article is somewhat dated (October 1997), but this proposition still rings true: writer Peter Schrag argues that no one is particularly interested in good news about public schools because maintaining a sense of crisis serves the ends of liberals, who want more money for schools, as well as conservatives, who want to divert money from public schools to private schools.

Actually, Schrag says, while many Americans believe that public education is a disaster, about 70 percent think that their own children’s schools are doing just fine.

The fact is, we’ve always known how to produce good public schools, and in white, well-off neighborhoods we continue to do so. If our public schools have a problem, it’s that we haven’t been willing to provide all of them with the resources to furnish every student with a completely equal education in completely equal facilities.

The Government Accountability Office reported recently that racial segregation is increasing in public schools, and that the number of black and Latino students who enrolled in impoverished schools, as defined by eligibility for price-reduced lunches, increased by 11 percent between 2001 and 2014.

Of course, school-choice proponents like DeVos always emphasize the advantages that choice will provide for the disadvantaged. But the most obvious and immediate effect of voucher programs is a significant financial break for wealthy families who can already afford to send their kids to private schools.

Public institutions, whose missions are to provide common benefits and meet common needs, tend to bring societies together. Most of what they do — firefighting, defending the nation, administering justice, delivering the mail to every address in the nation — isn’t well served by privatization and the profit motive.

Great countries provide great educations for all of their citizens as part of the public common good. And public education has served us much better than those with knee-jerk commitments to small government and low taxes are willing to admit.

But public education is threatened by the Trump administration, and in Betsy DeVos, President-Elect Trump has chosen the perfect agent to attempt its dismantling.

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.