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Washington, D.C. — Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called for abolishing the department she once led, saying it was established as a “political payoff” to teachers unions by President Jimmy Carter and its elimination should be in the Republican Party platform.
“It was the first year in [1976] that the teachers unions endorsed a candidate for president in Jimmy Carter,” DeVos said. “[The department] was his payoff to them in his only term in office.”
DeVos made the comments during a round table with reporters at the Young America’s Foundation National Conservative Student Conference, where she also called on the Republican Party to add abolishing the department to its platform two decades after the idea was removed at the party’s convention in 2000.
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“The spending that we have done at the federal level — over a trillion dollars since this department was opened to close achievement gaps,” she said. “Before the pandemic, the achievement gaps hadn’t narrowed one little bit. In fact, they were widened in most cases.”
“We have to stop doing what we’ve been doing and do something completely different,” she continued before adding that she wanted to see “a return to states setting the policy” and providing parents with the “finances for their kids education.”
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Since leaving her post as secretary of education in January 2021, DeVos has remained an active player in Republican politics, endorsing Tudor Dixon for the Republican nomination for governor in Michigan. She also released a book last month titled Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child about her time as secretary of education and the state of education in the U.S.
DeVos blasted Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), calling her a “disaster,” and encouraged Republican primary voters to support Dixon in the state’s primary scheduled next week.
“I think education is going to be a very key issue in Michigan, and those two could not be more diametrically opposed on what they think the solutions are,” the former secretary said. “We’ve seen Gov. Whitmer veto and turn down every attempt to empower parents to give families choices and to really make a difference for kids in Michigan. On the other hand, Tudor is very supportive of those very issues.”
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, DeVos said she believes education is an issue “conservatives can and should embrace heartily and without reservation.”
“Not only does it have macro impacts on the long-term health of our country, but importantly, it’s an issue that is very top-of-mind for so many families today,” she said, noting the role the issue played in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race won by Republican Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), who campaigned heavily on parental rights.
“If you don’t get education right, if kids don’t prepare and aren’t educated to take over as the next generation of leaders, we are all at a disadvantage,” DeVos said. “This is a macro issue for our country, and it’s a micro issue on the most personal level for every single child who doesn’t get that opportunity to become everything he or she can be.”
DeVos, a longtime advocate for school choice, praised recent legislation passed in Arizona that creates education scholarship accounts for the state’s 1.1 million students.
“[The program] is going to be transformative for kids and families there,” she said. “The reality is that during COVID and all the lockdowns, many families found solutions for their kids — with other families, with neighbors, with other acquaintances, they took it upon themselves to make sure their kids kept learning. The families that had the opportunity to do that, whether it was a homeschool consortium, or a micro-school, or a learning pod, were finding solutions, creative approaches to making sure kids could keep learning.”
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“Arizona has just guaranteed that those kinds of things, those kinds of opportunities, can continue to grow, can continue to multiply and flourish, and those are precisely the kinds of opportunities that we need to see in many other states across the country,” she went on. “Getting creativity, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship into education will change a system that for 175 years has remained fundamentally unchanged and is not meeting kids’ needs today.”
