Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, performed terribly at her confirmation hearings. She was poorly prepared, sometimes giving rambling answers without responding to the question, other times giving answers so wrong, it's clear she has made no serious attempt to learn about testing, curriculum or federal education law. And now it turns out, she plagiarized passages in her written responses to questions given to her by senators.

DeVos has few of the qualifications you'd expect of someone who wants to be in charge of education at the federal level. She earned her wealth the old fashioned way; she inherited it and married into it. She bought her way into Republican Party prominence by giving all kinds of money to candidates who supported her privatization/"education reform" agenda. She's never worked in a public school. She didn't attend public school and neither did her children. The only educational subjects she appears to know, or care, anything about are the use of tax dollars to pay for private school tuition and the reasons why charter schools are inherently better than "government" schools.

That's not a good start. But DeVos could have shown herself to be a serious individual by studying up on the subject matter before being grilled by senators, just like any student is expected to study before taking a test. But she didn't bother. Her implicit attitude was, "I'm white, I'm rich, I gave millions of dollars to the party. What else do you need to know?"

The person who hopes to preside over education in this country plagiarized on her take-home essay, then flunked her oral exam. For most people, that would earn them public embarrassment and a failing grade. For her, it's still probable it will earn her a corner office in the Department of Education Building in Washington, D.C.