Betsy DeVos, the country’s highly unpopular education secretary, had been asked to participate in an interview on 60 Minutes, and the news-media-shy billionaire philanthropist and school-choice advocate accepted the invitation.

The media appearance would be a high-stakes endeavor, and not only because it was pegged to the newly announced White House school-safety commission that she’ll be leading. It had been a little over a year since DeVos’s Senate confirmation hearing, a saga in which she had to convince key members of Congress that she, a person with very little experience in public schools, was fit to be the nation’s education chief.

The businesswoman-turned-cabinet-member reiterated her default talking points—“We should be funding and investing in students, not in school—school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems”—and at times seemed to unwittingly debunk them, saying she didn’t know enough about a given issue or providing a response that conflicted with a previous statement. She didn’t elaborate on research to back up her claims about, for example, the merits of charter schools and voucher programs or the best school-discipline practices.

At one point, after lamenting America’s struggling K-12 institutions and being asked whether she’d sought to actually spend time in them, DeVos acknowledged, “I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.”

DeVos reiterated her support for controversial plans to equip teachers with guns, before seeming to back away from the idea: “I couldn’t ever imagine her [my first-grade teacher] having a gun and being trained in that way.”

Read the full article on Betsy DeVos on 60 Minutes by Alia Wong at The Atlantic