At a heated three-and-half-hour confirmation hearing Tuesday evening, Senate Democrats predictably pressed the president-elect’s Education Secretary-designate. Betsy DeVos, a major Republican donor and school choice advocate, has proven one of his more controversial appointees: Her decades of philanthropic advocacy and public support for school choice initiatives make her an “anti-public education nominee” in the eyes of labor union leaders and the Democrats they support. (Plus, her family’s billions make her an oligarch, to borrow from Senator Bernie Sanders.)
In her opening statement to the Healthcare, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, DeVos emphasized her personal ties to public schools: Her mother was a public school teacher, “My greatest educational influence in life was a public school teacher named Elsa Prince.” She herself has mentored public school students in Grand Rapids, Michigan for many years. She expanded on her foundational belief that every child equally deserves the best local schooling to meet their needs, ideally to be chosen by parents from a diverse “mix of traditional publicly-funded and private schools.” And she defended the concept, oft-cited by school choice advocates, that competition and cross-pollination with charters and private schools only makes public schools better. Reform is “not just an issue of public policy but a national injustice” for her—one she’s made it her “life’s work” to correct. And it’s an ongoing struggle in need of a new approach her defenders, lately coming out in droves from both sides of the partisan divide, agree. DeVos fans have also referred to her “strong backbone” (per Barbara Bush) and commended her strength of conviction—traits that served her well Tuesday evening.
Ranking member Patty Murray, Washington Democrat, looked on sternly during opening remarks by Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and former Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush. (He thanked the committee for courteous conduct, “which I hope will be evident today.”) Her inexperience in public policy came under fire quickly, and her presumed indifference to the federal enforcement of civil rights standards broadened under the outgoing administration was a matter of concern for Democrats. They also grilled her on conflicts of interest, campaign donations to the same senators weighing in on her confirmation.
The committee had received required forms from DeVos and her FBI background check, but not the go-ahead of the Office of Government Ethics, even though that office had her required financial disclosures in hand. OGE’s delay, Murray said, is a little too Trumpian for comfort: “In an administration where lines around potential conflicts of interest are very likely to be blurred at the stop, they heed to be even clearer at the agencies.” DeVos has “gotten off on the wrong foot,” she scolded. Murray made her out an enemy of not only labor and public education but of ethical practice and really righteousness in general—this DeVos spokesman Ed Patru calls the “Cruella de Vil” caricature.
Most of all, committee members complained mainly about being only allowed one round of questions—procedurally fair, Chairman Alexander argued, because Republicans asked no more than one round of Obama’s appointees. The committee’s grousing inspired Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine to observe, “I cannot help but think that if my friends on the other side of the aisle had used their time to ask questions rather than complaining about the lack of a second round, each would have been able to get in a second question”—spoken in the manner of a middle school teacher.
Senator Sanders’s criticisms also inspired a teacherly admonition. He painted DeVos as a plutocrat and therefore an enemy of the people, asking how much money her family had contributed to the Republican party over the years and whether she would be where she is today if not for their donations—too numerous to count, as it happen. She answered his free college questions and requests that she help him Denmark-ify the American education system with stifling good sense. “Would you work with me and others to make public colleges and universities tuition free through federal and state efforts?” DeVos patiently told the 75-year-old United States senator, “Nothing in life is truly free. Somebody is going to pay for it,” to which he could only concede, “Err, yes, you’re right.” Sanders, rather than stick it out with his colleagues and ply the chairman for more time, left soon after.
And Massachesetts senator Elizabeth Warren, progressive firebrand, followed Sanders’s suit—not in leaving the room but by asking rather pointlessly whether DeVos has experience running a bank at the scale of the Education Department’s student loan outfit, and whether she or any member of her family has ever had to take out a loan from one. And, when the hearing was over, Warren brushed off a handshake form DeVos. Indeed, Warren’s rudeness and her choice to highlight the Secretary-designate’s known status as a (gasp!) wealthy person who is not a bank president—despite constraints on question time—would have seemed odd to anyone new to political theatre.
Such as the students, hard to miss in their crisp school uniforms, who were guests at DeVos’s hearing. They watched with furrowed brows. And they sat directly in front of a small cohort of college-aged young women in matching orange tee-shirts bearing the hand-drawn social-media-ready message “#DearBetsy: Support Survivors.”
It was Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey who brought out the old reliable panic button: the statistic that one-in-five college students is sexually assaulted. He invoked DeVos family donations to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, functionally an ACLU for college campuses. FIRE supports increased protections for due process rights, which the Department of Education’s 2011 Title IX guidance undermined by instituting a lower standard of proof for sexual misconduct claims. He asked her to “commit to retaining the standard of evidence as is currently the law.” And she clarified that because “sexual assault in any form is never okay,” its adjudication requires procedural fairness—to ensure that “the intent of the law is actually carried out in a way that recognizes both the rights of victims as well as those who are accused.” Senator Murray would ultimately close the hearing—however reluctantly—with a reprisal of this theme, asking that she commit to a creatively reinterpreted Title IX and promise not to “rein in” the department’s civil rights office, which greatly expanded under the last two education secretaries. DeVos instead replied that she would look closely at the law’s interpretation and implementation.
Chairman Alexander and Senator Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat from Connecticut who introduced DeVos, testified to her actually mainstream positions on school choice and renewed local control. She is a friend to American parents, among whom school choice and opportunities to consider another school for their children maintain the support of a stable majority, Alexander pointed out. They’re waiting for an education leader willing to “disrupt” a stagnant system. “I know that some people are questioning her qualifications,” said Lieberman. “Too many of those questions seem to be based on the fact that she does not come from within the education establishment. But, honestly, I believe today, that is one of the most important qualifications you can have for this job.”
Breaking from the status quo of the last eight years, what DeVos intends to do, will necessarily mean not reinterpreting laws and stretching the agency’s authority. Not just addressing a half decade’s overreach by the Office of Civil Rights but implementing the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act according to its intent will require a fresh approach to the agency’s federal authority.
“Would you try to get [a policy] through the Department of Education even though Congress couldn’t do it?” asked Chairman Alexander. DeVos answered that rather than issue mandates to enforce her ideas, she will see will set out “to implement laws as you intend them.” Respecting congressional authority and state legislatures’ freedom to decide best practices would be a welcome change for Republicans, constitutionalists, educators and families—as for the vast majority of Americans who prefer their states and local school boards maintain the greatest influence in education.
“I trust that you will not force particular policies on states, unlike what some in education do,” said Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah. His colleagues on the committee Senators Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska likewise noted one-size-fits-all federal policies sow controversy and fail to meet the diverse needs of families in their states.
“It does not take years of teaching in the classroom to understand that public education in this country is in deep crisis,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy Charter Schools, on Tuesday night in a statement supporting DeVos’s record. But Betsy DeVos’s decades of experience supporting alternatives to a flawed system reveal her intent to address its challenges. Her repeated promise to advocate for “great public schools” did not dampen detractors’ claims that supporting parental choice makes her a lousy friend to teachers and their unions.
She cited a growing need for a greater diversity of alternative programs—using the success of the Potter’s House, Christian school in her hometown which primarily serves low-income minority students, as a prime example. While her Christian faith may not have helped endear her to critics on the the committee, it does offer deeper insight into her philosophy.
How her Christian faith shaped her approach to education reform is something she neither advertises nor conceals. But when she professes faith in students’ innate capacities to succeed and trust in families’ abilities to choose what’s best for their children, DeVos speaks from a faith rooted in the same Christian worldview that compels her to serve. This “disruptive” outlook will no doubt come in handy, particularly if Tuesday night is any indication of what lies ahead.
