Devos leaves a legacy that could soon be reversed
Controversial figure resigned after riot
Betsy Devos spent four contentious years as education secretary as a tireless advocate for school choice, an ally of for-profit colleges and a frequent opponent of federal consumer regulations and civil rights protections.
She left office after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection as one of President Donald Trump’s best-known — though also most-polarizing — secretaries. Much of her policy work will probably be reversed by the Biden administration, just as she reversed policies of the Obama administration.
Her most lasting legacy may be a sweeping directive governing how schools handle allegations of sexual assault and harassment. Those rules, which give more due-process rights to the accused, will be difficult to unwind, though President-elect Joe Biden has said he will try.
The West Michigan native also used executive authority to roll back Obamaera guidance on affirmative action, and to require college campuses to recognize free speech rights.
Other Devos priorities required congressional action, and she was able to move almost none of them through Congress.
“If you want to make lasting changes in public policy, you need to enact laws,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government relations with the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities. “If you’re going to live by executive-branch action, you die by executive action.
That’s the world we live in.”
Devos was a stalwart ally to Trump, even as White House aides whispered that the president did not think much of her. She rarely said anything that could be read as criticism of Trump until Thursday, when she resigned with 13 days remaining, to protest his role in igniting a mob that breached the U.S. Capitol.
“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote in her resignation letter to Trump.
Her last day was Jan. 8. “It has been a privilege to serve America’s students alongside you,” she wrote in a brief goodbye note to Education Department staff that morning.
Her final chapter was a consequential one, as the coronavirus pandemic shut down U.S. schools. Devos joined Trump in pushing schools to reopen for in-person learning, with mixed success. Some experts agreed with her, fearing remote learning is leaving many children behind. Critics noted that the federal government failed to provide schools with clear guidance or funding that would have made it easier to open doors.
Before and during the pandemic, Devos trained her focus on school choice policies, which allocates taxpayer money to families who choose alternatives to traditional public schools. For Devos, that includes private schools, religious schools, parent-organized “pods,” home schooling and charter schools of all sorts.
She branded it “education freedom” and suggested federal dollars to support traditional schools had been wasted. When the pandemic hit, Devos saw the failure of some schools to open doors as evidence that parents needed taxpayer-supported alternatives.
In an interview last month with Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, she was asked what her most significant accomplishment was. “Hands down, it’s changing the national conversation around what K-12 education can and should be,” she replied.
Her work was welcomed by conservatives who argue that power over education belongs with parents, not systems.
“Not beholden to the education establishment and teachers unions, Betsy was clear from the beginning that she was the secretary of education, not just traditional public education,” said Kay C. James, president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that Devos and her husband have supported through their family foundation.
Her supporters note that several states have expanded school choice programs and say Devos’s advocacy made a difference in the public debate. But the issue went almost nowhere in Washington.
“She’ll be remembered as an unapologetic voice for expanded school choice, and I think after racking up no legislative victories over the past four years, it’s hard to see a lot of concrete impact of that,” Hess said in an interview.
Her signature proposal would have created a type of federal school voucher program, where donations to state scholarship programs would be reimbursed in the form of federal tax credits. It garnered GOP support in Congress but was opposed by Democrats, who control the House, and some Republicans.
Devos has said she regrets not pushing the issue harder earlier in Trump’s term, when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. Her best chance was probably in a sweeping tax bill, signed in 2017, but the White House did not even include school choice proposals in its blueprint for the bill.