President-elect Trump plans to nominate GOP mega-donor and school choice advocate Betsy DeVos to be his education secretary on Wednesday, raising questions about his long-standing promise to scrap the controversial state-run education program known as Common Core.
DeVos, a Michigan-based political activist who formerly served as chairwoman of the state’s Republican Party, is the second woman to be appointed by Trump to a Cabinet-level role in his administration.
“Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate. Under her leadership we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families,” Trump said of his latest appointee. He and DeVos first spoke over the weekend in a meeting at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club that included Vice President-elect Mike Pence.
But DeVos also has ties to educators and organizations that advocate for Common Core. Numerous Common Core opponents, many of whom supported Trump’s presidential bid, criticized him for even considering DeVos to head the Education Department ahead of Wednesday’s announcement.
“We adamantly oppose any nomination for U.S. education secretary who has either openly supported or passively assisted Common Core by enabling education centralization, which includes most of the education establishment on the Right and Left,” Joy Pullman, a fellow at the conservative Heartland Institute, wrote in an online petition last week.
“Such a pick would contradict your campaign promises,” she noted.
Trump described Common Core, a set of education standards used in more than 40 states, as disastrous in many of his stump speeches and interviews.
“Common Core is gone. We are getting rid of Common Core. We’re bringing education to a local level,” Trump said after his South Carolina primary victory in mid-February.
“[It’s] education through Washington,” he then explained to CNN in March. “I don’t want that. I want local education. I want the parents and I want all of the teachers, and I want everybody to get together around a school to make education great.”
But with DeVos at the helm of the Department of Education, such campaign promises could be put in jeopardy.
DeVos, 58, chairs the American Federation for Children, a Washington-based school choice advocacy group that has reportedly contributed to pro-Common Core challengers in Alabama school board races. She also serves on the board of directors for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a think tank in Tallahassee, Fla., that secured significant financial support from left-leaning donors to promote Common Core education standards nationwide.
In Michigan, DeVos is a board member of the Great Lakes Education Project, which endorsed Common Core as an “important step” in “efforts to improve academic achievement, increase accountability and empower parental choice in our public schools.”
Until the announcement of her appointment, DeVos had been reluctant to comment publicly on Common Core, despite maintaining ties to various groups that support it. She tweeted Wednesday that she is “not a supporter – period.”
“Have organizations that I have been a part of supported Common Core? Of course,” she added in a separate post on her personal website. “But that’s not my position.”
An official with the Trump transition team did not return the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
