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Twenty years before she joined Donald Trump’s wrecking crew Cabinet, DeVos had explained that, as a billionaire campaign contributor to conservative causes, she was on a mission.
In March 2017, the eleventh Secretary of Education for a nation founded on James Madison’s premise that “learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people” because “they throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty” embraced a federal budget proposal to cut $9 billion from programs that support public education.
Yes, public schools would suffer. But Betsy DeVos was delighted that the Trump Administration’s budget blueprint called for steering $1.4 billion toward the gimmicky “school choice” programs that she had championed for decades as an alternative to public education. These are programs that education historian Diane Ravitch, who served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, has decried as a “hoax” that destroys communities and public schools.
DeVos had gotten what she paid for. Twenty years before she joined Donald Trump’s wrecking crew Cabinet, DeVos had explained that, as a billionaire campaign contributor to conservative causes, she was on a mission.
“I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party. Occasionally a wayward reporter will try to make the charge that we are giving this money to get something in return, or that we must be purchasing influence in some way,” she wrote in an essay for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. After explaining that she did not always get everything that she demanded, DeVos continued, “I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return.”
“I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return.”
“We expect a return on our investment,” wrote DeVos, an heir to a manufacturing fortune (and the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, the private military services contractor) who married into the Amway fortune. She described that “return” as Republican Party election wins and the advancement of “a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues.”
Over the next two decades, DeVos used her money to make the Republican Party an ever more outlandish critic of public education and an ever more unapologetic advocate for steering public money into discredited choice, charter, and privatization schemes.
A special-interest power player who travels in the elite circles of billionaire political players like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, DeVos has used inherited wealth to buy her way into the elections of states across the country. She has done so in order to advance an agenda that is as unworkable as it is irresponsible.
DeVos has never been an education “reformer,” as she is frequently described. She’s a rightwing political activist who entertains “Make America Great Again” fantasies about recreating the Gilded Age. It just happens that DeVos has settled on public schools as the vehicle for advancing the societal transformation she seeks.
When Trump nominated DeVos to serve as Secretary of Education, one of the most prominent education reformers in the United States, billionaire Eli Broad, wrote to senators urging her rejection. “I believe she is unprepared and unqualified for the position,” said Broad. “Indeed, with Betsy DeVos at the helm of the U.S. Department of Education, much of the good work that has been accomplished to improve public education for all of America’s children could be undone.”
Broad supports charter schools, and he has clashed at times with teachers’ unions over school issues. But, as he explained in his letter, “We must have a Secretary of Education who believes in public education and the need to keep public schools public.”
Though the Senate did not follow Broad’s wise counsel, his point was well taken. DeVos is not interested in public education; she is interested in politics, and in using politics to engage in rightwing social engineering.
“Betsy DeVos claims she’s a reformer but actually she’s a privatizer. She wants everybody to be able to take their money and go to a religious school—that’s her first choice,” Ravitch noted of the Secretary of Education who never attended a public school and has throughout her adult life been an ardent advocate for religious-right doctrines and the schools that teach them.
As the DeVos nomination fight raged, Ravitch told WBEZ radio in Chicago that Betsy and her husband Dick DeVos began putting their money into charter schools after engineering a failed referendum in Michigan. They started to funnel money to similar efforts in other states, often to “elect people who are opposed to public education.”
According to Ravitch, “What makes DeVos an unusually bad choice for the U.S. Secretary of Education is that she’s a lobbyist. She’s not an expert in education. Since 1980, most secretaries have been governors with experiences dealing with budgets and understanding that 90 percent of the kids in their state go to public school—not to charters or vouchers. But she’s an advocate that comes in with hostility to public education. She invests money into election campaigns across the country to defeat people who support their public schools, so it’s a bizarre choice to say the least.”
Bizarre, and dangerous.
Many of Trump’s cabinet picks have been critics of the agencies they were chosen to head, but DeVos is more than that. She led a movement to attack public education itself. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten has identified DeVos as “the most ideological, anti–public education nominee put forward since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education.”
Weingarten, who has worked closely with teachers and parents in states across the country, objected to DeVos’s nomination because of the billionaire’s advocacy for an agenda focused on “privatizing, defunding, and destroying public education in America.” DeVos, she said, “has no meaningful experience in the classroom or in our schools. The sum total of her involvement has been spending her family’s wealth in an effort to dismantle public education in Michigan.”
That fact alone should have derailed DeVos, who is best understood as a political operative, not a serious thinker regarding education, and whose confirmation hearing was a train wreck. But DeVos got a narrow 51–50 pass from a Senate, thanks to Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote. Among those who voted yes were at least twenty-one Republicans who had accepted major campaign donations from the DeVos political operation.
The individual donations by DeVos and her family totaled almost $1 million, coming in increments as high as $98,300 for Florida’s Marco Rubio. If Rubio alone had turned against DeVos, she would have been rejected by the Senate. Instead, he hailed Trump’s nominee as a champion of “educational opportunity for all.”
DeVos bought the framing of the debate about education in the United States by spending hundreds of millions of dollars that she said “helped people become more open to what were once considered really radical reforms,” such as vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts.
DeVos bought the framing of the debate about education by spending hundreds of millions of dollars that she said “helped people become more open to what were once considered really radical reforms,” such as vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Problem is, she never promoted honest debate about whether those reforms would actually benefit students.
The problem, for DeVos and for America, is that she never promoted honest debate about whether her proposals would actually benefit elementary and secondary school students. She was too busy playing politics.
A former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, DeVos and her husband, Dick (a former Michigan gubernatorial candidate), have directed hundreds of millions of dollars into the ideological and electoral infrastructure that supports school privatization. While many DeVos investments were ideologically inspired as opposed to explicitly partisan, she acknowledged to the Senate that total DeVos family giving to Republican candidates and campaigns could total $200 million.
“Nowhere is the impact of the DeVos family fortune greater . . . than in the movement to privatize public education,” explains a People for the American Way study. It looks into how the DeVos political operation has used a family fortune to “create an intricate national network of nonprofits, political action committees, and federal groups known as 527s that effectively fund the political arm of the school voucher movement.”
This operation warped politics not just in Michigan but in states such as Wisconsin, where the billionaires were early and ardent supporters of Governor Scott Walker and anti-labor allies. Walker received $70,000 in direct contributions to his 2010 gubernatorial race from “choice” advocates. But even more money was spent on so-called independent campaigning by groups that poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into promoting Walker and his legislative allies and attacking supporters of public education.
Walker and the other Republican governors, whose exploitation of a politics of resentment gave rise to Trumpism, could not have succeeded as they did without DeVos’s money machine. All of this made Betsy DeVos incredibly influential at the state level years before she became incredibly influential at the federal level. But not in a good way.
One group with which DeVos has been associated, the political action committee All Children Matter, was fined a record $5.2 million by the Ohio Elections Commission after it was charged with illegally shifting money into the state to support candidates considered friendly to private-school “choice” initiatives. It was also fined for political misconduct in Wisconsin, where officials determined that the secretive group’s 2006 campaigning violated campaign finance laws by expressly urging voters to cast ballots against legislative candidates who were strong backers of public education.
Those troubles led to the evolution of All Children Matter into the American Federation for Children, which has collected money from a who’s who of rightwing millionaires and billionaires, including the political operations of rightwing donors Charles and David Koch. The money helped Republicans to win elections, in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, and solidified DeVos’s reputation as a go-to donor for national Republican contenders.
But this largess has not improved education in those states. Rather, it imposed a failed ideological construct that borders on fantasy, and that has much more to do with attacking the unions that represent teachers and the infrastructure of public education than with helping students achieve their full potential. In Walker’s Wisconsin, for instance, the group One Wisconsin Now stated that “we have seen her school privatization playbook in action in Wisconsin, and the result is more failure and less accountability.”
Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, called DeVos “a driving force for the privatization of our public schools. She’s used her family’s wealth to reward politicians who support her agenda across the nation, including Scott Walker and Republicans in Wisconsin.” In his view, “Being a billionaire whose hobby is underwriting campaigns to steal our public school dollars and send them to unaccountable private schools disqualifies her from being our Secretary of Education.”
Ross is right. But in Donald Trump’s Washington, where big money and insider connections matter far more than relevant experience and good ideas, Betsy DeVos got a return on her investment.
Adapted excerpt from Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America by John Nichols. Copyright © 2017. Available from Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group Inc.
John Nichols is a contributing writer for The Progressive. He writes about politics for The Nation and is also associate editor of The Capital Times, the newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other newspapers. Find him on Twitter @NicholsUprising.