After 6 months on job, education chief still highly divisive
WASHINGTON — Among the paintings and photographs that decorate Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ sunlit, spacious office is the framed roll call from her Senate confirmation. It’s a stark reminder of the bruising process that spurred angry protests and some ridicule and required the vice president’s tie-breaking “yes” vote.
After six months on the job, DeVos is no less divisive.
Critics see her as hostile to public education and indifferent to civil rights, citing her impassioned push for school choice and her signing off on the repeal of some protections for LGBT students.
Conservatives wish she were less polarizing and more effective in promoting her agenda, noting the department’s budget requests are stalled in Congress, and no tangible school choice plan has emerged. DeVos is undeterred.
“We have seen decades of top-down mandated approaches that protect a system at the expense of individual students,” DeVos told The Associated Press. “I am for individual students. I want each of them to have an opportunity to go to a school that works for them.”
In her first comprehensive sit-down interview with a national media outlet since taking office, DeVos touched on some of the most pressing issues in K-12 and higher education.
She said Washington has a role to “set a tone” and encourage states to adopt choice programs without enacting “a big new federal program that’s going to require a lot of administration.” At the same time, she confirmed a federal tax-credit voucher program was under consideration as part of a tax overhaul. “It’s certainly part of our discussion,” DeVos said.
DeVos, 59, appeared confident but reserved during the 30-minute interview last week in her office, where photographs of her children and grandchildren and drawings and letters from young students are prominently displayed. Large windows overlook the Capitol. Across the street, visitors lined up outside the National Air and Space Museum, which DeVos toured this year with Ivanka Trump to promote science and engineering among girls.
DeVos defended her decision to rewrite Obama-era rules intended to protect students against being deceived by vocational nondegree programs, saying, “The last administration really stepped much more heavily into areas that it should not.”
Liberals have accused DeVos of looking out for the interests of for-profit schools, and they point to Trump University, the president’s for-profit school that was sued for fraud. Supporters have said the Obama regulations unfairly targeted for-profits and failed to track students’ long-term careers.
The decision by the departments of Education and Justice to roll back rules allowing transgender students to use school restrooms of their choice enraged civil rights advocates, who said already vulnerable children could face even more harassment and bullying. Conservatives saw DeVos fulfilling a promise to return control over education issues to states, cities, school districts and parents.
“We really believe that states are the best laboratories of democracy on many fronts,” DeVos said.
On the issue of school choice, DeVos was resolute. Another major flashpoint: charter schools, which are publicly funded but usually independently operated, and voucher programs that help families cover tuition at private schools. They’re often criticized for a lack of transparency, and studies about their effectiveness have produced mixed results. DeVos disagrees.
“I think the first line of accountability is frankly, with the parents,” she said. “When parents are choosing school they are proactively making that choice.”
For DeVos, who spent more than two decades promoting charter schools in her home state of Michigan, the closure of some low-performing charters was evidence of accountability. “At the same time, there have been zero traditional public schools closed in Michigan for performance, and I think that’s a problem,” she said.
DeVos got off to a rocky start in the Trump Cabinet.
She was satirized for some of her gaffes during the confirmation hearing, such as saying guns are needed in schools to protect students from grizzly bears. Teacher unions accused her of seeking to privatize public education. Parents and teachers jammed congressional phone lines to oppose her nomination.
It took Vice President Mike Pence’s historic vote — the first by a vice president to break a 50-50 tie on a Cabinet nomination — to secure her position after two Republican senators defected.
DeVos is still sometimes met with protesters at public events, and her security detail has been bolstered at an additional cost of $7.8 million.