There are problems on both sides.
In many ways, our public education system has created its own mess. The US funds schools at a higher level than most other countries, but much money is misspent. Around here, they come back for bond money for the same projects every few years, while little gets done. Then there are overly generous pension plans. I have a friend who only had to work for 10 years at a community college in order to qualify for a full pension including full paid health insurance for the rest of her life. That's just plain wrong. It used to be worse --- for a long time, you only needed to work for 5 years in San Francisco public schools to get those benefits. Public universities hire too many administrators and then "save" by hiring adjuncts.
If the public schools here were as good as public schools in other countries, people like me wouldn't pay for private schools/universities.
On the other side, the right wing appears to want to gut the system under the guise of fixing it. For example, they talk about "access," which sounds great. But IMO, this word means, if you have enough money, you're in. So vouchers provide access, but only if you can afford what the voucher doesn't cover. (They may increase enrollment in religious schools, because their fees are relatively low.) And of course, wealthy people will save money because of them. I suspect that vouchers will mostly benefit people who were already sending their kids to private schools, making access not really what the ad implied --- a few thousand bucks won't allow a middle class family to send Mary to Choate.
De Vos clearly isn't qualified for this job except as someone who can turn education into a profit center via charter schools. But at the same time, the public schools need to admit their failings and move past them to find constructive solutions, or the right will continue to have all kinds of reasons to howl about "reform."
