America’s fastest-growing food chain has taken its customer-pleasing brand of savory deliciousness and rapid, polite service to New York City where it is proving that northern city dwellers enjoy the same thing that has captivated southerners for decades. Chick-fil-A Inc. is meeting the primary test of acceptance, which is the market test. Lines are long. Business is booming. If the Atlanta-based company with $9 billion in sales last year were traded publicly (it remains privately held), the city’s Wall Street community would be bidding the stock up to stratospheric levels. 

But the company’s success sticks in the craw of some who find it to be an alien presence due to the Christianity of the family who owns the company and their traditional values. A recent New Yorker piece refers to the Chick-fil-A expansion as a “creepy infiltration” of the city. The writer expresses part of his alarm by noting that the company’s headquarters includes a “statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet.” (I have to admit that I’m surprised by the writer’s apparent disgust at this portrayal of humility, love, and service.)

The Trump Administration and Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have submitted their attention-getting budget request.  Consistent with the credo of budget balancers, the proposed allocation reduces the current budget of $68.2 billion by about $9 billion.  In keeping with DeVos’s  career and reputation, the budget includes a relatively small allotment of $400 million to support school choice for low income children and charter schools.  The idea is that this amount would grow in succeeding years and perhaps supersede other approaches to improving education in the United States.

Both facts, the lower amount of funding and the dollars for school choice, highlight concerns raised by DeVos’s detractors.  When she was nominated, public education advocates complained that her status as a school choice advocate is at odds with the mission of the Department of Education.  If school choice effectively functions as a standing critique of public education as well as being a potential solution to problems evident in the current system, how can public school advocates ever approve of an appointee like Betsy DeVos?

That question leads to others. What is the mission of the Department of Education?  And if that mission is defined as advancing public education in the United...