For years the school systems in Connecticut’s cities have been acknowledged as terrible, most of all by themselves, as those city school systems have sued state government charging that they fail because state government unconstitutionally underfunds them. Deciding the lawsuit last September, a Superior Court judge, Thomas G. Moukawsher, agreed. He’d heard testimony from city school officials that state education policy is mainly social promotion and that city schools long have been giving high school diplomas to illiterates.

Last week, though, President Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, changed all that. In testimony to Congress, she argued that because many public schools are failing, federal money should be diverted to alternative schools to provide choice. In support of her argument, Mrs. DeVos told of having met at a community college in Florida a young man who described himself as a product of the school system in East Hartford and who learned little there even as he was promoted from grade to grade and through high school, where disruptive students were in charge, where he was constantly bullied, and where teachers were indifferent to what he described as “dangerous day care.”