Education Secretary Betsy DeVos May Exit Post Early: Report

WASHINGTON, DC — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is unable to fill senior level positions at the Department of Education, where morale is sagging, and has had budget failures that some education insiders say could mean the controversial Trump administration appointee will exit the job early, Politico reported. The February confirmation of the western Michigan billionaire came down to a historic tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence after two Republican senators broke ranks with their party. Democrats in the Senate scorned DeVos, whose children attended private school, for a perceived attack on public education and what they said was a general lack of knowledge about how the success of the nation's public education system is measured.

DeVos’ first budget proposal, which reallocated some public funding to private school choice initiatives, failed to gather steam in the Republican-controlled Congress. And though she succeeded in getting a tax credit for tuition to private elementary and secondary schools in the first iteration of Republicans’ tax bill, unveiled last week, it faces stiff opposition from conservative groups that say the credit doesn’t help low-income families.

President Trump had billed DeVos as a reformer who would take on special interests that stifle debate on improving the U.S. education system. So far, she has had little success with her priorities.

DeVos was ridiculed in the sharply divided confirmation hearings when she argued teachers should be allowed to have guns in the classroom to ward off “potential grizzlies,” but fierce opposition stemmed from fears that she would further dilute a limited pool of federal education dollars by funding school choice voucher program.

Democrats, along with Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, also said DeVos lacked a basic understanding of education policies. For example, she stumbled when Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat, asked if she favored education policy based on growth or proficiency, as measured by standardized tests.

Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an independent education think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, told Politico that “in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long.”

“And for my money, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if she left,” Toch said. “I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”

DeVos has downplayed the failure to get her budget approved, saying it was a first attempt.

“Well, let’s keep in mind that this is only the first budget cycle,” she told Politico. “There are other budget cycles.”

DeVos has used her family’s Amway fortune to lobby for school choice in her home state in Michigan, and though charter schools have greatly expanded there, the schools received failing grades on student achievement tests, according to the “Nation’s Report Card.” The federal data shows Michigan schools as a whole rank near the bottom for fourth- and eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading, and that students in private schools perform lower on achievement tests than their counterparts in public schools.

DeVos told Politico the idea she wants to defund public education is a gross misrepresentation of her position on the issue. “I mean, nothing could be further from the truth,” she said. “Public schools are great. Great public schools are really great. But no school is as great as it can be.”

Aside from her zealous advocacy for school choice, DeVos’ first few months on the job have been tumultuous. She is accompanied by federal marshals when she travels, a security detail that costs about $1 million monthly, after a threat was identified in February when the education secretary was physically blocked by protesters when she tried to visit a Washington, D.C., middle school.

DeVos has made a series of missteps since her confirmation, including a February statement that called historically black colleges and universities school-choice pioneers and garnered widespread ridicule and scorn. The HBCUs, as they're known, were mainly established after the Civil War to fight Jim Crow-era racial exclusion.

"They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality," she said at a meeting of HBUC leaders at the White House. "Their success has shown that more options help students flourish."

And in September, she rolled back Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual assault investigations, a move critics blasted as one that extends protections to assailants and sends a message to victims that their reports will be met with skepticism and doubt. DeVos has said the Obama policies were heavy-handed, skewed against those accused of assault and pushed schools to "overreach."

The new temporary guidelines allow publicly funded colleges and universities to set their own standards of evidence when investigating campus assaults. They can still use the "preponderance of evidence" standard set by Obama in a 2011 letter that framed campus sexual assault as a Title IX civil rights issue, but they may also use the harder-to-prove standard of "clear and convincing evidence."

The Politico profile said that though Washington insiders may be preparing for DeVos’ departure, she is tenacious and is not apt to give up without a fight.

“She’s not somebody who ever needed to do politics or needed to be in education,” former Michigan Gov. John Engler, a Republican who served from 1991 to 2003, told Politico. He said that when he was governor and DeVos was the state Republican Party chairwoman, they were at odds on whether to pursue a ballot initiative that authorized public funds for private schools. Engler overruled DeVos, so she funded the ballot campaign herself, but it failed by a margin of more than 2-1.

The Politico profile said DeVos may be digging in to maximize her influence where she can, but also noted: "If there’s one thing DeVos has learned so far, it’s that getting your way in Washington requires time, patience and government savvy — three things she does not have.”

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