The Cheerleader

Her confirmation hearing had amounted to a verbal mugging. She was mocked as a clueless amateur and portrayed as an enemy of public education. And that was just the critique from Democratic senators. Their outside allies were less constrained. Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson worried that confirming DeVos would lead to gay kids being herded into religious schools, where they’d be driven to suicide. “Betsy DeVos’s policies will kill children,” he tweeted. “That is not an exaggeration in any sense.” Bill Maher joked that DeVos “is the worst person to be around schoolbooks since Lee Harvey Oswald.” Teachers’ unions warned that DeVos was “an actual danger to students” and “the most anti-public-school nominee in the history of the department.”

DeVos’s confirmation required a vice-presidential tie-breaking vote, a first for a cabinet appointee, and the vilification followed her into office. On her first visit to a public school, protesters physically blocked her from entering, with one activist drawing near her and repeatedly screaming, “Shame!” Protest became the norm at her public appearances; when a U.S. marshal’s detail was assigned to protect her, critics complained of the cost. “Everyone,” the Huffington Post flatly declared last fall, “hates the education secretary.”

“It’s hard,” DeVos says. “It has been hurtful in a lot of ways, because I’ve been misunderstood, and I think it’s hurtful to be misunderstood.”

But DeVos’s opponents understood exactly who she was. For 30 years, she’s been a determined and effective advocate of school choice: a target of the organized left long before Donald Trump ever ran for president. She is a school-choice fundamentalist who believes that taxpayer money should follow students to whatever schools families deem best—including private ones. That is what makes her anathema. Being a billionaire and an evangelical Christian only makes her an easier target.

The opposition to DeVos’s nomination became a political campaign. Activist groups on the left teamed with teachers’ unions, flooding the Capitol switchboard and filling senators’ inboxes with instant outrage. DeVos was so thoroughly demonized that Democratic politicians around the country use her name as fundraising bait. Lisa Murkowski, one of two Republican senators who voted against DeVos’s confirmation, says she was persuaded by the outpouring of calls and emails from everyday Alaskans. That outpouring was owing largely to a mobilization effort organized by an activist named Alyse Galvin, who has parlayed her anti-DeVos campaign into a run for Alaska’s only House seat, held for 45 years by Republican Don Young.

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Some of the animus toward DeVos reflects the view among professional educators that she is a meddlesome dilettante, a wealthy amateur who involves herself in education in order to have something to do. This caricature, though unkind, reflects DeVos’s biography, as well as the story she often tells about what drew her to the school-choice crusade.

Her father, Edgar Prince, was a clever engineer from Holland, Michigan, who (family lore holds) helped to develop the lighted sun visor that became standard equipment on the world’s automobiles and who built a manufacturing firm that eventually sold for more than $1 billion. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a former Navy SEAL and the founder of the security firm Blackwater. Her husband, Dick DeVos, is scion of the family that built Amway.

DeVos attended private schools in Michigan, as did her own four children. One day, she and her husband visited a private Christian school in Grand Rapids called the Potter’s House, which focused on serving underprivileged children. When she heard stories about how the parents of the children she met there struggled to pay tuition, she was struck by a sense of injustice and determined to use her wealth in the cause of giving other such parents the opportunity that she’d taken for granted. To DeVos, her work for school choice is, literally, an act of Christian charity.

Trump’s election seemed like a golden opportunity for the school-choice movement. The president himself has no record on the issue, but Mike Pence is a true believer, and Trump promised during his campaign to spend $20 billion in block grants to promote school choice, including private-school options for disadvantaged children. The DeVos appointment was a characteristic Trumpian grace note, like naming Scott Pruitt, bête noire of environmental activists, to head the EPA.

The choice movement had further reason for optimism when Trump’s first education budget was released last spring. It cut $9 billion from various programs, but added $1.4 billion for programs advancing school choice—including money for private-school vouchers.

Democrats were predictably opposed to the budget, most sounding like a version of former Obama education secretary John King, who called the Trump plan a “scheme to divert resources from our highest need schools.” But congressional Republicans weren’t much more enthused about the proposal, mostly because they didn’t like such deep cuts or the diversion of money to voucher programs. Some conservatives warned that sending federal money to private schools could have unintended consequences, on matters both mundane and profound. Most parents now sending their kids to private schools arrange for transportation themselves. But under some future, more activist administration, conservatives warned, a bureaucrat could condition voucher eligibility on whether a school provides transportation. “If a federal bureaucrat decided what private schools needed to do, in terms of curriculum or anything else, suddenly you’ve created this morass,” says Frederick Hess, the director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. The Trump-DeVos budget was shut down.

DeVos herself seems conflicted by the implications of any expansion of the federal role in K-12 education, even for so cherished a cause as school choice. She came to the job deeply suspicious of bureaucratic overreach, and her short time at the agency has confirmed her view. At a speech last May to the American Federation for Children, a school-choice group she’d cofounded and chaired, she tried to temper expectations of an activist tenure from her. “We should have zero interest in substituting the current big government approach for our own big-government approach,” she told the group. “When it comes to education, no solution, not even ones we like, should be dictated or run from Washington, D.C.”

When we meet in her office in mid-January, DeVos repeats a point she makes often—that the federal government wields outsized influence on states and local school districts because of the regulatory power attached to federal dollars. “Federal funding for education has accounted for less than 10 percent of the total spent, yet the footprint from a regulation perspective has been much, much bigger,” she says. “Our goal is to continue to roll out of that, to the extent that we can do that within the department.”

DeVos’s aim is a pleasant rarity in Washington. She wants to meaningfully reduce the size and the reach of the agency she runs, diminishing her own power in the process. It happens that our meeting takes place on the eve of a government shutdown, and her team has put in place a plan to furlough about 90 percent of the department’s 4,000 employees. I ask what will happen if the shutdown lasted into the school week.

“School should go on,” she says.

Why not just make the furlough permanent?

She laughs, then says, “We’re continuing to look at the whole of the footprint of this department to ensure that we are returning and moving power to the states in every way possible.”

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As it happens, conditions are quite propitious for DeVos’s devolutionary mission, owing to—of all things—a late Obama-era law designed to rein in the federal government’s influence over America’s schools.

The Department of Education didn’t exist until 1979, when Jimmy Carter, making good on a promise to the National Education Association, created a new cabinet-level agency. Ronald Reagan, who saw the agency as an intrusion on local affairs, tried to eliminate it, to no avail. (A 1982 New York Times article on the effort was subtitled “The Department That Would Not Die.”) The department, and its influence over American schooling, steadily grew through the decades, with no correlative improvement in student outcomes.

Still, as the learning gap between disadvantaged students and their peers widened, both Republicans and Democrats worried. In 2001, George W. Bush and Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy decided that the fix was a massive expansion of federal involvement and together produced the education overhaul called No Child Left Behind. The law set national achievement goals and prescribed standardized tests to determine whether schools were meeting the targets. Those that did not meet the proficiency goals were subject to an escalating scale of punishments imposed by the feds. If a school failed to meet standards two years in a row, it was labeled a School in Need of Improvement and required to develop plans for addressing its failure. Repeated failure could result in all or part of the school’s staff being fired and a state takeover.

No Child Left Behind was hugely expensive, highly intrusive, and a massive failure. The standardized exams, which inevitably led to “teaching to the test,” were unpopular with parents and students. Teachers considered the punitive elements ineffective and unfair. By 2011, the Education Department reported that 37 percent of the nation’s schools were failing to meet the annual goals, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan predicted that number would rise to 82 percent by 2014.

The Obama administration should have scrapped No Child Left Behind, but decided instead to tinker—and, of course, to spend more money. The feds offered states waivers from the onerous law, along with Race to the Top grants (using money provided by the stimulus program), while awarding them points for adopting the Common Core curriculum—a set of standards for the math and English students ought to be learning. Unsurprisingly, most states took the dough and adopted Common Core. Test scores did not improve—they actually dropped in math.

“We saw two presidents from different political parties and philosophies take two different approaches,” DeVos said in a recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute assessing the reform efforts of the last two administrations. “Federally mandated assessments. Federal money. Federal standards. All originated in Washington, and none solved the problem. Too many of America’s students are still unprepared. Perhaps the lesson lies not in what made the approaches different, but in what made them the same: the federal government. Both approaches had the same Washington ‘experts’ telling educators how to behave. The lesson is in the false premise—that Washington knows what’s best for educators, parents, and students.”

The long, failed experiment of the Department of Education acting as a national school board ended in 2015, when Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. The guiding force behind the legislation was Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander, who as chairman of the Senate’s primary education committee and a former secretary of education himself is Washington’s most influential voice on education policy. Alexander wanted the government’s role in schooling dramatically cut back, to something like its modest beginnings, and he managed to shape legislation that would please conservatives while leveraging teachers’ opposition to the Bush-Obama programs to help win over Democrats.

The law perfectly anticipated the deregulatory impulses of the Trump-DeVos era. It didn’t eliminate testing, but the standards and the matter of holding to account those schools that failed to achieve them would be left up to the states. And in measuring results, states could employ factors other than test scores. The federal government would not coax them toward a favored reform path, as Obama had done with Common Core (and as some conservatives want DeVos to do with school choice).

Looking back, DeVos wonders how ESSA ever happened. She suspects that liberals must have counted on an activist Education Department to interpret the law. “I think, frankly, that the left figured that they could regulate a lot more beyond what was passed legislatively,” she says. Indeed, toward the end of the Obama administration, the department created rules that ran counter to the spirit of ESSA—one tying teacher-training money to student performance and another giving the feds a say in deciding which schools were failing and how to improve them. Alexander led an effort to overturn the two rules, employing a rarely used check on midnight regulating called the Congressional Review Act.

In January 2017, as the new administration was transitioning into power, Alexander met with a group of 700 state school administrators and school board members, assuring them a new day had come. They should assume the new Department of Education would “say yes” to whatever plans they devised to improve their schools. “You will have a president and an education secretary who do not believe in a national school board,” he said. “They believe in you. They want you to make those decisions.”

But bureaucracy, as DeVos and Alexander would soon learn, does not turn nimbly.

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One day last June, Delaware’s secretary of education, Susan Bunting, received a letter from DeVos’s agency containing some dismaying news. The state’s ESSA plan was being rejected.

“Because the proposed long-term goals for academic achievement are not ambitious,” the letter instructed, the Delaware department of education “must revise its plan to identify and describe long-term goals that are ambitious for all students and for each subgroup of students.” The letter went on at length, listing the many ways that Delaware’s school plans lacked ambition and required more rigor.

Similar letters were received by Bunting’s counterparts in New Mexico and Nevada. Soon, the phones were ringing in Alexander’s office, and angry state officials were sharing their frustrations. The senator talked to the Education Department staffer who’d sent the letters and explained that the point of the law was that states, not the federal government, would decide what was “ambitious” and “rigorous.”

The department staffer, acting assistant secretary of education Jason Botel, didn’t seem to take Alexander’s point. Botel, a school-reform activist from Baltimore, had come to the department on the recommendation of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who were friends and business associates of Botel’s patrons, property developer Reed Cordish and his wife Maggie Katz. But Botel is a particular sort of reformer, a social-justice advocate who sees school choice as a way, he once wrote, to “dismantle the white supremacist system that exists.” When Botel arrived at the thinly staffed Education Department and was told by career staffers that their job was to instruct states on how to reform, he was not inclined to disagree.

Alexander called DeVos, who seemed unaware of the situation, according to several people familiar with the incident. “She was appalled,” one of them recalls.

After a talking-to from the seventh floor, Botel got with the program (“he evolved,” as one co-worker put it) and is now considered a valuable member of DeVos’s team. But the episode was a lesson in bureaucratic dynamics for DeVos, a wealthy outsider from the private sector who is still adjusting to the rhythms and pace of a federal agency. Before coming to Washington, DeVos was accustomed to working on an iPad with a keyboard attachment. When she arrived at her new job, she planned to continue doing so but was told that she’d have to order a government-issued device. She made the order soon after she was sworn in, in February. The government iPad was delivered to her in July.

More frustrating has been the task of winning over the department to an entirely new vision of its purpose. “That is a challenge,” DeVos says. “I think there was a lot of skepticism when I first came in, particularly given the whole confirmation process and how intense it was.” Alexander and other allies on the Hill have provided helpful counsel, and DeVos has beefed up the team around her. Among her top aides is Peter Oppenheim, a former staffer for Alexander who helped write ESSA.

DeVos says that she sees signs that the bureaucracy is beginning to respond. “I mean, there are people here who want to do what’s right for students,” she says. “And I think they are, more and more, being won over in that regard. . . . I’ve had all-staff engagements regularly. And we’ve tried to find leadership, and develop leadership, within the staff, too, that is aligned and will help to bring their cohort around. And we’re finding some, yes.” She begins her second year wiser in the ways of Washington and with a new understanding of her own role.

In 1987, William Bennett, Reagan’s third secretary of education, attended an education forum in Chicago, where he remarked that Chicago’s schools were the worst in the nation. His comment was roundly criticized by local leaders, especially Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Harold Washington, who noted that Bennett worked for Ronald Reagan, “who has literally dismantled public education in this country.”

But the next day, Washington convened a civic group to begin considering school reform.

That story was recently recounted by a DeVos ally, by way of illustrating that a secretary of education can have impact without exercising much actual power. In the era of ESSA, DeVos can’t mandate her favorite school reforms, and her department can’t tilt the scales toward choice. That leaves her with the bully pulpit, which DeVos says she’ll use to persuade states to shake free of what Bennett once termed “compliance mode.”

“I’m pretty intent on having an opportunity to further encourage states to do things to embrace the flexibility that they have, and to encourage creativity, and to, frankly, push that flexibility down to the local level,” she says. “And not do what the federal government has done for the past couple of decades, which is consolidate control.”

She does have some meaningful administrative power, which she has used, for instance, in rescinding the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter on sexual harassment, which led college campuses around the country to erect a regime of adjudication that many believe denies the accused due process. DeVos will replace the Obama policy, but only after going through the formal regulatory process of proposing a rule, followed by a period of public comment from all sides.

She has instructed her staff, per a presidential order issued last year, to examine the vast store of her department’s existing regulations and to cull the deadwood.

“Probably an equally important thing is what we are not doing,” she says. “We are not adding new regulation and new burdens to states, school districts, communities, parents, and teachers.”

Betsy DeVos still means to make her mark as education secretary—but it won’t be in the manner that her opponents feared or that her allies in the choice movement wished for.

As it happened, the day I went to interview her was the start of National School Choice Week, and she later attended a rally on Capitol Hill of choicers and kids from six D.C. charter schools. “We need to collectively rethink how we do education here in this country,” she told them. “We need to give parents empowerment and choices to choose the right school, the right education, for all of their children.”

And then she led them in a cheer: “When parents have a choice, kids have a chance!”

Peter J. Boyer is a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard.