Betsy DeVos has resigned after serving almost four years as Education Secretary. In doing so, she harshly criticized the president who appointed her. “We should be highlighting and celebrating your administration’s many accomplishments on behalf of the American people,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Instead, we are left to clean up the mess caused by violent protesters overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people’s business. There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”
DeVos has received a lot of criticism since she was first appointed, particularly from teachers unions and the education establishment that her Reagan era predecessor William Bennett called “the Blob.” She didn’t have experience as a teacher, much less an Ed.D. degree like Jill Biden. She and her husband are billionaires, members of one of the two founding Amway families, and have been active philanthropists nationally and in the Grand Rapids metro area. She served several terms as Michigan Republican chairwoman; her husband Dick DeVos was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for governor in 2006.
Betsy DeVos did not enter or leave the job with a high opinion of the education establishment. As she told the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess in a National Review interview, “For the past quarter-century, there has been no meaningful change in test scores, yet, as taxpayers, we pay more and more for education each year. And by too many measures, the gaps are even widening.”
In my view, DeVos deserves special thanks and praise for rescinding two Obama administration policies. Both were advanced as “guidance” in letters by the Education Department in letters to schools across the country, without going through the rule-making procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act. DeVos did the hard work of holding hearings, inviting comments, and preparing justifications for changing those policies. That’s not easy, as she told Hess, “The bureaucracy is even more bureaucratic than any of us could ever have imagined, and it takes longer to get anything done than I could ever have imagined.”
One rule was the Obama “guidance” pushing colleges and universities to set up administrative procedures on sexual assault charges that amounted to kangaroo courts. The results are set out in KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor’s 2017 book The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities. DeVos’s regulation outlawed the practice of having a single investigator serving as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury. It required “clear and convincing” evidence rather than just a preponderance of evidence before students could be declared guilty, potentially blighting the rest of their lives. It allowed the cross-examination of complainants but also required training for rape shield procedures as used in criminal procedure.
The other controversial DeVos change was her revocation of the Obama “guidance” requiring racial quotas for student discipline. The Obama bureaucrats evidently believed that racist teachers and administrators — remember, these are members of overwhelmingly Democratic teachers unions — were discriminating against black students. The result was what you might expect: less discipline and, as one teacher put it, “an uptick of bullying and classroom misbehavior.”
Children in different gender, ethnic, and racial categories don’t misbehave in identical proportions; boys act up more than girls, and children who lack fathers in their homes, a description that applies to more black than to white or Asian children, tend to act up more in school. And, of course, persistent misbehavior makes it hard for other students to learn.
The incoming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate may try to use the Congressional Review Act to rescind DeVos’s regulations on these and other subjects. I hope such efforts can be resisted. College and university administrators have surely noted that following the Obama administration “guidance” has resulted in a lot of successful lawsuits against their institutions, which have cost them plenty of money. School principals and superintendents have surely noticed that racial quotas on discipline have resulted in students, particularly those from disadvantaged areas, learning less. Can they be persuaded to oppose the wrecking crew that is bent on overturning DeVos’s worthy achievements?
