Since her deeply contested confirmation hearings, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been criticized for incompetence and ignorance regarding the public education system. But this lens obscures the extent to which DeVos’s decisions as secretary are less inept bungling than intentional right-wing strategy. As a 2017 New York Times editorial put it, DeVos is “the perfect cabinet member for a president determined to appoint officials eager to destroy the agencies they run and weigh the fate of policies and programs based on ideological considerations.”[1] And she sees the COVID-19 pandemic as a long-awaited opportunity to reshape education.[2]
From the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic response, DeVos leapt to advance her agenda of privatizing the education system, promoting conservative Christian schooling, and enabling racist, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Her commitment to building “God’s kingdom” through private Christian education and her advocacy of free markets and opposition to regulations draws in the Christian Right, libertarian groups, and other secular misogynist and racist actors, like men’s rights activists.[3] Bringing differing ideological groups into collaboration to pursue a common purpose has been a hallmark of U.S. right-wing strategy for decades, facilitated by networks such as the DeVos family-funded Council for National Policy.
DeVos and her allies have made multiple attempts during the pandemic to move funding to private education, some successful, others thwarted or still-pending. In March, for instance, DeVos used relief funding for “microgrants” that could be used for private education providers, prompting Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to denounce her for using pandemic relief “to augment her push for voucherlike programs.”[4] But that $180 million was just a start. [5] When Republican Senators Tim Scott and Lamar Alexander introduced a COVID education relief bill in July, they inserted a prior DeVos proposal providing for a permanent tax credit supporting privatized education by up to $5 billion per year.[6] The bill came in the wake of the underreported June Supreme Court decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which prohibits states from limiting government funding for private schools to only secular institutions, opening new opportunities for funding religious education.[7]
As the new school year approached, DeVos and President Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal funding to pressure K-12 public schools to reopen for in-person instruction in the fall, rejecting concerns about student, teacher, and staff health. An impasse between the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on an additional round of pandemic relief funding persisted into October, leaving K-12 schools to begin the semester without additional federal assistance—and without knowing if the final legislation would follow the GOP’s plan to tie its $70 billion in education support to holding in-person classes.[8] If schools didn’t reopen in person, Trump pitched that this “funding should follow students so parents can send their child to the private, charter, religious, or home school of their choice.”[9] Such a determination would represent a massive influx of funding into the privatized education industry with severe long-term consequences for the stability of the public school system.
The pandemic threatens lasting consequences for public education not only thanks to the Right’s direct actions, but also liberal organizations and officials operating under the opportunism mindset of “disaster capitalism.”[10] In May, Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo raised alarm bells by announcing a plan to work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to “reimagine education” following COVID-19, disparaging that “old model of everybody goes and sits in the classroom.”[11] Liberal collaboration with the movement framed as promoting “school choice” is an element of the DeVos strategy to advance education privatization, and appears to overlook the roots and continuing mission of the privatization project in maintaining racial segregation and advancing Christian supremacy.
Segregation, Christianity, and School Choice
White conservative Christians have viewed education as a vital battleground for decades, protecting the maintenance of White Christian patriarchy in younger generations through actions such as contesting desegregation, opposing sexuality education, monitoring textbooks, and dominating local school boards.[12]
Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending segregation in public schools, Southern states worked to maintain White supremacy by providing White families with vouchers to attend one of thousands of new private “segregation academies.”[13] These institutions were sometimes referred to as “freedom of choice schools,” in contrast to what the Right demonized as “government schools.”[14] Many advertised themselves as Christian academies, such as the Lynchburg Christian Academy (now Liberty Christian Academy), founded in 1967 by Southern Baptist Rev. Jerry Falwell as a church ministry. The flight of hundreds of thousands of White students, taking taxpayer dollars with them, drained the funding available to educate Black children left in public schools.
Outside of the segregationist South, conservative parents and groups campaigned for the maintenance of Christian, White, patriarchal norms in public education in the 1960s and ‘70s. Major flash points included sexuality education and curriculum battles, with a particularly heated textbook controversy in Kanawha County, West Virginia, fueling incidents of violence. In 1974, Alice Moore, a mother and wife to a Church of Christ minister, denounced Kanawha County’s new language arts curriculum emphasizing multiculturalism as anti-White and anti-Christian.[15] The local battle attracted a range of outside Rightist support, from Texan conservative Christian textbook monitors Mel and Norma Gabler, to the White supremacist Ku Klux Klan, to the newly formed Heritage Foundation, which, under the leadership of New Right architect Paul Weyrich, sent two staff members there to support, advise, and learn from the campaign. The battle and resulting publicity helped shape a lasting New Right frame portraying “secular humanism” as a threat indoctrinating children in public schools with anti-Christian beliefs. The 1978 book Blackboard Tyranny, by Connaught “Connie” Marshner, one of the Heritage staff members sent to Kanawha County, advised parents on fighting against secular humanism in their own districts.[16]
Over the course of the 1970s, the Supreme Court undermined the viability of segregation academies, barring first taxpayer funding for racially discriminatory private schools and then discrimination in private schools itself. Weyrich, Falwell, and other outraged Christian leaders painted enforcement of these decisions as religious persecution, rather than attempting to defend their prejudice explicitly, rallying evangelicals to the New Right.[17] Falwell, whom Weyrich had recruited to found the Moral Majority, wrote in his 1979 book, America Can Be Saved!, that he longed for a day when “we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over and Christians would be running them.” (Trump originally tapped Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., as education secretary. The younger Falwell chose to remain president of the conservative Christian Liberty University instead, and in August 2020 resigned from that position following a sexual scandal.[18])
DeVos is not the first education secretary bent on dismantling public education. She follows in the tradition of William Bennett, education secretary under President Ronald Reagan. (Reagan himself campaigned on disbanding the Department of Education, only just formed in 1979 under the Carter administration.[19]) Former Federal Communications Commission Chair Reed Hundt recalled Bennett choosing to withhold support for funding and infrastructure-building in order to weaken public schools over the long-term, expressing the desire for public schools to fail and “be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.”[20]
When taxpayer money goes to private religious schools through vouchers, it has been used to support theocratic, misogynist, racist, and homophobic educational materials.[21] One of the largest recipients of federal charter school funding distributed by DeVos this April, Responsive Education Solutions (RES), develops conservative Christian-based, White male supremacist curricula under a secular veneer.[22] According to a 2014 investigative report in Slate, RES textbooks contained false statements about evolution; defended the Confederate South; referred disparagingly to the “homosexual lifestyle”; and advanced the myth that vaccines cause autism—misinformation with particular relevance as anti-vaxxers have joined protesters opposing stay-at-home orders, seeking allies against the distribution of a future COVID vaccine.[23]
The DeVos-Prince Family Legacy
“Although hardly a household name, if Betsy DeVos has her way, every American could feel her reach,” analyst Rob Boston wrote in 2010 for Church & State. “DeVos’ goal is nothing short of a radical re-creation of education in the United States, with tax-supported religious and other private schools replacing the traditional public school system.”[24] Over the course of three decades, DeVos has advanced a conservative, corporate, Christian agenda to expand private religious education under the mantra of “school choice.” Legislation enabling school vouchers—tax money that students can take with them out of the public education system to subsidize private school tuition—has been a key area of her philanthropic investment. Redirecting funding from public to private schools implicitly entails shifting public funding from secular to religious education since two-thirds of private schools (enrolling three-quarters of private school students) are religiously affiliated.[25]
DeVos is positioned at the intersection of two massive conservative inheritances that give her influence as a major donor and the funding to create and run her own education privatization advocacy groups.[26] Her father, Edgar Prince, made a fortune through his automotive business, while her husband, Dick DeVos, hails from Amway wealth.[27] In 2015, Forbes reported that the DeVos family foundations alone had given a total lifetime contribution of $1.2 billion dollars, and the family appears annually on the publication’s list of 50 Top Givers, most recently appearing at number 26 with reported giving of $112 million in 2018.[28]
The extended DeVos-Prince family have been major Christian Right and free market donors for 40 years.[29] The Council for National Policy, a secretive network of influential Rightist figures who assemble annually to strategize, featured DeVos’s father-in-law, Richard DeVos, as the keynote speaker of its January 1983 meeting.[30] The group would also receive substantial funding from the DeVoses and Princes from the 1980s forward.[31] Other major beneficiaries of the two families include the Family Research Council (FRC), an influential anti-LGBTQ Christian Right organization that Edgar Prince helped found; the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank with significant influence on the Trump administration; the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); and many others.[32]
Betsy and Dick DeVos have followed in this legacy of supporting right-wing causes. In the 1990s, their foundation’s largest grants went to FRC and Focus on the Family, but the couple developed their philanthropy into the 2000s with a focus for Betsy on education privatization and for Dick on weakening unions through so-called “right-to-work” legislation.[33] Their foundation has continued to provide substantial funding to organizations supporting Sec. DeVos’s agenda during the current administration, such as support, from 2017-2018, for the Alliance for School Choice ($1 million), where she previously served as chair of the board; the Acton Institute ($300,000) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy ($650,000), two Michigan-based think-tanks supporting school vouchers and right-to-work legislation; and AEI ($1.25 million), where Betsy previously served on the board and Dick currently does.[34]
The couple also invested in for-profit companies in the right-wing privatization world, like virtual schooling provider K12, Inc., developing corporate partners who would in turn support their agenda. In 2000, former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett co-founded K12 with a former McKinsey consultant to provide online education “centered in the Judeo-Christian tradition” to virtual charter schools and homeschoolers.[35] From 2005 on, K12 worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to design and promote model legislation for states that would allow virtual school expansion, taking on a secular image in acquiring profitable state and local school district contracts.[36]
Funding of advocacy, research, and legal organizations demonstrates the DeVoses’ strategic understanding of the greater impact that policy change can have versus direct charity. Speaking in 2001 to “The Gathering,” a meeting of wealthy conservative Christians, Sec. DeVos rejected the suggestion that Christian education should rely on direct philanthropic support rather than seek taxpayer funding through vouchers.[37] “We could give every single penny we have, everybody in this room could give every single penny they had, and it wouldn’t begin to touch what is currently spent on education every year in this country,” she argued, and touted education reform as a way to “advance God’s Kingdom.”[38] While the DeVos family foundations donate around $100 million total per year, as education secretary with influence over government policy and funding, DeVos is directing hundreds of millions to privatization and pushing to redistribute billions.
The DeVoses’ strategy is also insidious in intentionally couching a right-wing agenda so as to manipulate liberal cooperation. In 2002, William Bennett introduced Dick DeVos for a speech at the Heritage Foundation that discussed another element of the family’s long-term strategy to push school privatization: liberal allies. Dick urged caution among his fellow conservatives in publicly supporting vouchers and “education choice,” to avoid turning off liberals who would otherwise buy into the idea of education freedom and push the agenda for them.[39] For instance, following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans witnessed the complete dismantling of its traditional public schools—an example lauded by the DeVos-founded American Federation for Children—thanks to entities including the liberal Gates Foundation.[40]
In her home state of Michigan, Betsy DeVos took advantage of Detroit’s struggling public school system to push a massive expansion of for-profit charter schooling—but without success in producing better student outcomes.[41] Since charter schools have taken over about half of the Detroit public school population, de facto segregation has increased as White students leave more integrated schools for Whiter districts.[42] Waste, corruption, and lack of oversight can be problems with charter schools across the country, but Michigan stands out for the lack of regulation resulting from DeVos’s influence.[43] From 2006 to 2014, $7.7 million went to 72 charter schools that never opened.[44] A majority of Michigan charter schools are run by for-profit companies accountable to shareholders and not student outcomes or the public.[45] This includes K12, Inc., which operates the largest charter school in the state.[46]
Seeing Opportunity in Crisis
“The current disruption to the normal model is reaffirming something I have said for years,” DeVos announced this April, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country. “We must rethink education to better match the realities of the 21st century.”[47] The pandemic has offered DeVos an opportunity to pour hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into her privatization agenda, taking advantage of the Education Department’s discretionary power over COVID relief funds hurriedly passed by Congress—or using her position to redirect funding in what appear to be illegal actions. In September, a federal court ruling struck down a DeVos policy requiring school districts to allocate a greater share of relief funds towards private schools. The policy eschewed the typical federal formula, which allocates funding based on low-income student population, in favor of using total student population—increasing the amount going to private schools, which disproportionately serve more wealthy students.[48] An Education Department spokesperson responded to the lawsuit with a right-wing talking point, denouncing “that so many favor discriminating against children who do not attend government-run schools.”[49]
DeVos used her discretion over $350 million in higher education relief funds to use the bulk of the money—intended for struggling colleges and universities—to give small colleges total grants of half-a-million dollars each without assessing their need.[50] Under the original funding formula, compared in a Center for American Progress analysis, many of these schools were allocated only a few thousand dollars or, at most, tens of thousands.[51] Giving them $500,000 instead drained the pool of available funding for public universities in need. The decision, though it might look like bungling, is in fact continuous with DeVos’s agenda of prioritizing private religious education at the expense of secular public education. It provided substantial extra money to almost 90 percent of U.S. faith-based colleges, according to Ben Miller, a former DoE staffer and a CAP education analyst. [52] (For instance, Calvin Theological Seminary, based in DeVos’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was awarded $500,000 rather than its original allocation of $71,301; the private Christian college is also a grantee of the DeVoses’ foundation.[53])
K12, Inc., which brought in more than $1 billion in revenue in 2019, anticipates greater profits from the current crisis, as school districts and students seek remote learning options this school year. But the company expects this will last beyond short-term adjustments. Timothy Medina, K12’s chief financial officer, said on an April quarterly earnings call, “We believe the effects of Covid-19 will be a lasting tailwind to online education.”[54] K12 is part of a 2020 Heritage Foundation “National Coronavirus Recovery Commission” to design policy moving forward, which so far has largely recommended lifting regulations and standards for online schooling services, changes that would last beyond the current pandemic and further virtual education despite poor student outcomes.[55]
The $180 million DeVos already distributed for microgrants and incentivizing, expanding, or launching new virtual schools is just a drop in the bucket compared to $5 billion per year in proposed tax credits for contributions to private education providers.[56] DeVos advocated for these “Education Freedom Scholarships” last year at an ALEC meeting sponsored by K12.[57] On July 22, Republican Senators Tim Scott and Lamar Alexander introduced the School Choice Now Act, which added a permanent version of DeVos’s proposed tax credit among the emergency pandemic appropriations for privatized education.[58] A recent Supreme Court decision would prohibit states from requiring that this funding go only to secular schools, representing a potentially substantial transfer of public funding from secular to religious education if passed.
Expanding Religious Education, Reducing Discrimination Protection
On June 30, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that states must include religious schools in programs providing student aid to attend private schools, opening the door to dramatically expand taxpayer funding for faith-based schools. The case was brought by the Institute for Justice—a long-time DeVos foundation grantee also known for its opposition to affirmative action—to challenge state “Blaine amendments” that prevent public funding from going to religious schools.[59] In a January op-ed for USA Today, DeVos urged SCOTUS to clear the path for expanded public funding of religious schools, writing, “we are especially eager for the Supreme Court to put an end to the ‘last acceptable prejudice’ made manifest in bigoted Blaine Amendments to 37 state constitutions that deny students the freedom to pursue faith-based education.”[60]
Following the court’s ruling, DeVos released a statement “calling on all states to now seize the extraordinary opportunity to expand all education options at all schools to every single student in America.”[61] Lily Eskelsen García, former president of the National Education Association, worried that the decision will make it harder for states to resist DeVos’s pressure to fund private religious schools. She commented in a statement, “At a time when public schools nationwide already are grappling with protecting and providing for students despite a pandemic and mounting budget shortfalls, the court has made things even worse by opening the door for further attacks on state decisions not to fund religious schools.”[62]
Greater taxpayer funding to religious schools means more students vulnerable to legal discrimination under DeVos’s policies. Earlier this year, the Department of Education issued a new religious exemption allowing any “educational institution that is controlled by a religious organization” to disregard Title IX civil rights protections for students without losing federal funding by claiming the requirements violate their religious tenets.[63] The exemption can even be claimed retroactively, after a sex discrimination claim has already been filed. A letter from a group of Democratic senators this February warned this “could provide federally-funded faith-based institutions and student organizations a license to discriminate against students, employees, and beneficiaries who are LGBTQIA+, as well as women.”[64]
It’s also an opening to end anti-discrimination protections for other groups. The DeVos Department of Education has severely reduced accountability for discrimination by schools; not only with respect to Title IX and sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but also racism, xenophobia, and ableism.[65] Know Your IX board member Wagatwe Wanjuki situates DeVos’s actions on Title IX as “part of a decades-long movement to eradicate civil rights in America, particularly in relation to education, [and] part of the backlash to desegregating schools long ago.” She continues, “That, I think, is going to be one of the Trojan Horses for the right-wing to bring back segregation to schools, and basically use federal money at their will. … I think this shows a really good example of how you can’t separate White supremacy from male supremacy.”[66] (See Sidebar: “Catering to Male Supremacists with Title IX.”)
Reopening: Routes to Making Privatization Permanent
In July, DeVos and Trump announced that public schools would have to reopen for in-person instruction in the fall, rejecting health and safety concerns, a decision that has been attributed to Trump’s desire to reopen the economy before Election Day.[67] DeVos walked back an initial threat to withhold federal funds from public schools unwilling to comply (which would have been illegal); instead, the GOP proposed tying tens of billions in relief funding to in-person reopening. School districts were already facing budget shortfalls of up to 25 percent due to plummeting tax revenue, and DeVos has further strained resources by pushing their funding to private schools.[68] In August, Trump said that school funding in a proposed $70 billion K-12 education relief package should “follow students” to privatized alternatives if public schools did not reopen.[69] (Ultimately, the beginning of the school year came and went without an agreement on this second round of relief funding; as of October, the entire COVID-19 relief package, including education funding, remained stuck at an impasse.)[70]
While DeVos claimed that her advocacy to physically reopen public schools arose from concerns about children’s education, that rationale conflicts with her long-term support for private virtual schooling, even in the face of its poor educational outcomes. But one notable outcome of a reckless push for in-person instruction—without providing resources for recommended safety precautions—is that it encourages parents to exit the public education system.
This summer saw a spate of reporting on economically privileged parents, wary of school reopening plans, hiring private teachers for expensive homeschooling pods—moving their children out of the public education system, which often also means removing tax dollars, too.[71] An industry quickly sprang up to meet the new demand, and the conservative Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) has lauded “entrepreneurial teachers” who are “cashing in on the opportunity.”[72] This exit from the public education system for parents with the financial resources to do so exacerbates economic inequity and encourages de facto segregation, with children of color disproportionately left behind.
By hamstringing public schools’ ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic through temporary crisis measures that balance needs for safety and education, wealthy and White flight to privatized education can turn temporary adjustments into more permanent changes. While Betsy DeVos is obviously unqualified to support a thriving public education system, her actions during the pandemic made clear how she was most likely selected for a very different set of competencies: a lifetime’s experience in undermining secular public education, expanding private religious schooling, and reinstating standards of White, Christian male supremacy.
In that respect, she is more than qualified to advance such a transformation.
Endnotes
[1] The Editorial Board, “Betsy DeVos Teaches the Value of Ignorance,” The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/opinion/betsy-devos-teaches-the-value-of-ignorance.html.
[2] Jeff Bryant, “How a Trump administration official is quietly exploiting the pandemic to advance her family business — and right-wing agenda,” Raw Story, April 23, 2020, https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/how-a-trump-administration-official-is-quietly-exploiting-the-pandemic-to-advance-her-family-business-and-right-wing-agenda/.
[3] Kristina Rizga, “Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America’s Schools to Build ‘God’s Kingdom,’” Mother Jones, March/April 2017, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/betsy-devos-christian-schools-vouchers-charter-education-secretary/.
[4] Erica L. Green, “DeVos Funnels Coronavirus Relief Funds to Favored Private and Religious Schools,” The New York Times, May 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/politics/betsy-devos-coronavirus-religious-schools.html.
[5] Green, “DeVos Funnels Coronavirus Relief Funds.”
[6] “Scott and Chairman Alexander Introduce School Choice Now Act,” Tim Scott, United States Senator, July 22, 2020, https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/scott-and-chairman-alexander-introduce-school-choice-now-act.
[7] Lauren Camera, “The High Court Takes on School Choice,” US News, January 21, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-01-21/the-high-court-takes-on-school-choice.
[8] Katie Connor, Julie Snyder, and Dale Smith, “The next economic relief package: From CARES, HEALS and Heroes,” CNET, August 26, 2020,
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/cares-heals-and-heroes-acts-similarities-and-key-differences/.
[9] “President Donald J. Trump Is Working to Give Students and Parents Flexibility and Schools the Support They Need to Reopen This Fall,” White House Fact Sheet, July 23, 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-working-give-students-parents-flexibility-schools-support-need-reopen-fall/.
[10] Sarah Lahm, “How the Ed-Tech Industry Is Trying to Profit From COVID-19,” The Progressive, March 23, 2020, https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/edtech-industry-profit-from-covid-19-lahm-200323/.
[11] Valerie Strauss, “Cuomo questions why school buildings still exist — and says New York will work with Bill Gates to ‘reimagine education,’” The Washington Post, May 6, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/06/cuomo-questions-why-school-buildings-still-exist-says-new-york-will-work-with-bill-gates-reimagine-education/.
[12] Janice Irvine, Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States, (University of California Press, 2004).
[13] Noliwe Rooks, “Cindy Hyde-Smith Is Teaching Us What Segregation Academies Taught Her,” The New York Times, November 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/opinion/cindy-hyde-smith-mike-espy-senate-mississippi.html.
[14] Katherine Stewart, “What the ‘Government Schools’ Critics Really Mean,” The New York Times, July 31, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/opinion/donald-trump-school-choice-criticism.html.
[15] Irvine, Talk About Sex.
[16] Carol Mason, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy (Cornell University, 2009).
[17] Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Politico, May 27, 2014, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.
[18] Katherine Stewart, “Betsy DeVos and God’s Plan for Schools,” The New York Times, December 13, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/opinion/betsy-devos-and-gods-plan-for-schools.html; Jan Wolfe, Aram Roston, Katanga Johnson, “U.S. evangelical leader Falwell to leave university after personal scandal,” Reuters, August 25, 2020,
[19] Dan Bauman and Brock Reed, “A Brief History of GOP Attempts to Kill the Education Dept,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-brief-history-of-gop-attempts-to-kill-the-education-dept/.
[20] Bill Smith, “Charter schools perform worse than public schools, for-profits are even worse,” Johnson City Press, March 11, 2018, https://www.johnsoncitypress.com/opinion/blogs/charter-schools-perform-worse-than-public-schools-for-profits-are-even-worse/article_6206af1c-2b99-500a-a15d-80d64a46b89f.html.
[21] Rachel Tabachnick, “Vouchers/Tax Credits Funding Creationism, Revisionist History, Hostility Toward Other Religions,” Talk to Action, January 30, 2017, http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/5/25/84149/9275.
[22] “Secretary DeVos Awards $65 Million to Create and Expand Public Charter Schools in Areas of Greatest Need,” US Department of Education, April 10, 2020, https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/secretary-devos-awards-65-million-create-and-expand-public-charter-schools-areas-greatest-need.
[23] Zach Kopplin, “Texas Public Schools Are Teaching Creationism, Slate, January 16, 2014, https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/creationism-in-texas-public-schools-undermining-the-charter-movement.html;
Katie Orr, “Anti-Vaccination Activists Join Stay-At-Home Order Protesters,” NPR, May 9, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/852861698/anti-vaccination-activists-join-stay-at-home-order-protesters.
[24] Rob Boston, “Sneak Attack,” Church & State, September 2010, https://www.au.org/church-state/september-2010-church-state/featured/sneak-attack.
[25] Stephen P. Broughman, Adam Rettig, and Jennifer Peterson, “Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results From the 2015–16 Private School Universe Survey,” National Center for Education Statistics, August 2017, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017073.pdf.
[26] Rachel Tabachnick, “Preview of “School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias,” Talk to Action, June 27, 2011, http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/6/27/151131/081.
[27] Betsy’s brother, Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary company Blackwater, was recently implicated in spying on a Michigan teachers’ union for the right-wing Project Veritas. https://www.salon.com/2020/03/11/watchdog-group-demands-congress-investigate-if-betsy-devos-knew-about-efforts-to-spy-on-teachers/.
[28] Shandra Martinez, “$1.2B in donations puts DeVos family on Forbes top philanthropy list,” MLive, October 1, 2015, https://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/2015/10/13b_in_donations_puts_devos_fa.html; Jennifer Wang, “America’s Top 50 Givers,” Forbes, November 20, 2019, forbes.com/top-givers/#4914997466ff.
[29] Rachel Tabachnick, “Prince and DeVos Families at Intersection of Radical Free Market Privatizers and Religious Right,” Talk to Action, January 9, 2017, talk2action.org/story/2011/5/16/123025/506/Front_Page/Prince_and_DeVos_Families_at_Intersection_of_Radical_Free_Market_Privatizers_and_Religious_Right.
[30] 1983 Meeting Agenda.
[31] Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok, “The Council for National Policy: Behind the Curtain,” Southern Poverty Law Center, May 17, 2016, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/05/17/council-national-policy-behind-curtain.
[32] Catherine Brown and Ulrich Boser, “The DeVos Dynasty: A Family of Extremists,” Center for American Progress, January 23, 2017, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/default/news/2017/01/23/296947/the-devos-dynasty-a-family-of-extremists/; Jonathan Mahler, “How One Conservative Think Tank Is Stocking Trump’s Government,” The New York Times, June 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-aheritage-foundation-think-tank.html.
[33] Andy Kroll, “Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan’s Plan to Defund the Left,” Mother Jones, January/February 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/devos-michigan-labor-politics-gop/.
[34] Igor Derysh, “Betsy DeVos’s Family Foundation Funnels Money to Her Right-Wing Supporters,” Truthout, December 19, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/betsy-devoss-family-foundation-funnels-money-to-her-right-wing-supporters/; “Mackinac Center President’s Statement on Betsy DeVos Nomination,” The Mackinac Center, n.d., https://www.mackinac.org/23028; Frederick M. Hess, “DeVos and the new normal in education,” American Enterprise Institute, February 7, 2017, https://www.aei.org/articles/devos-and-the-new-normal-in-education/; “Board of Trustees,” American Enterprise Institute, n.d., https://www.aei.org/about/board-of-trustees/.
[35] Wendy Shuman, “Bill Bennet’s Online Schoolhouse,” BeliefNet, October 2001, https://www.beliefnet.com/love-family/parenting/2001/10/bill-bennetts-online-schoolhouse.aspx.
[36] Nick Surgey, “Secretary DeVos Speaking at ALEC, Sponsored by a Private Company, to Thank Them for Helping to Privatize Education,” Documented, December 5, 2019, https://documented.net/2019/12/devos-alec-k12inc-arizona/.
[37] Kristina Rizga, “Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America’s Schools to Build ‘God’s Kingdom,’” Mother Jones, March/April 2017, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/betsy-devos-christian-schools-vouchers-charter-education-secretary/.
[38] Benjamin Wermund, “Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s kingdom,” Politico, December 12, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-education-trump-religion-232150.
[39] Rachel Tabachnick, “Strategy for Privatizing Public Schools Spelled Out by Dick DeVos in 2002 Heritage Foundation Speech,” Talk to Action, November 23, 2016, http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/5/3/12515/58655/Front_Page/Strategy_for_Privatizing_Public_Schools_Spelled_out_by_Dick_DeVos_in_2002_Heritage_Foundation_Speech.
[40] Lahm, “Ed-Tech”; Paul Dauphin, “10 years after Katrina: Louisiana’s landscape of school choice,” American Federation for Children, June 25, 2015, https://www.federationforchildren.org/10-years-katrina-louisianas-landscape-school-choice/; Sarah Lahm, “How The Ed-Tech Industry is Trying to Profit From COVID-19,” The Progressive, March 23, 2020, https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/edtech-industry-profit-from-covid-19-lahm-200323/.
[41] Mark Binelli, “Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost,” The New York Times, September 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/magazine/michigan-gambled-on-charter-schools-its-children-lost.html.
[42] Mike Wilkinson, “Betsy DeVos and the Segregation of School Choice,” BridgeMI, November 29, 2016, https://www.bridgemi.com/talent-education/betsy-devos-and-segregation-school-choice.
[43] Peter Greene, “DeVos Makes New Charter School Grants from Troubled Fund,” Forbes, April 11, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/04/11/devos-makes-new-charter-school-grants-from-troubled-fund/#75f80dbe7298.
[44] Jeff Bryant, “Why the federal government’s billion-dollar charter school program is a complete disaster,” Salon, December 12, 2019, https://www.salon.com/2019/12/12/why-the-federal-governments-billion-dollar-charter-school-program-is-a-bigger-disaster-than-we-thought_partner/.
[45] “Background on Betsy DeVos from the ACLU of Michigan,” American Civil Liberties Union, n.d., https://www.aclu.org/other/background-betsy-devos-aclu-michigan.
[46] Binnelli, “Michigan Gambled.”
[47] Valerie Strauss, “Betsy DeVos finds new pot of cash to push education agenda: federal covid-19 relief money,” The Washington Post, April 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/04/30/betsy-devos-finds-new-pot-cash-push-education-agenda-federal-covid-19-relief-money/.
[48] Michael Stratford, “Judge strikes down DeVos plan to boost pandemic relief for private schools,” Politico, September 4, 2020, politico.com/news/2020/09/04/devos-private-school-relief-rule-struck-down-409272.
[49] Michael Stratford, “Judge blocks DeVos plan to send more pandemic relief to private school students,” Politico, August 26, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/26/judge-blocks-devos-plan-pandemic-relief-private-school-students-402900.
[50] Erica L. Green, “DeVos Funnels Coronavirus Relief Funds to Favored Private and Religious Schools,” The New York Times, May 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/politics/betsy-devos-coronavirus-religious-schools.html.
[51] “CAP Modeling of CARES Act Higher Ed,” Center for American Progress, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2020/05/08055827/CAP-M….
[52] Ben Miller, Twitter, May 1, 2020, https://twitter.com/EduBenM/status/1256237821867823104. Some schools made the decision not to accept the funds allocated.
[53] “CAP Modeling”; Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, “Form 990-PF for period ending December 2018,” ProPublica, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/382902412/01_2020_prefixes_38-39%2F382902412_201812_990PF_2020011517034407.
[54] Indigo Oliver, “A Virtual Charter School Company Says Covid-19 Is the ‘Tailwind’ It’s Been Waiting For,” In These Times, June 18, 2020, https://inthesetimes.com/article/charter-schools-coronavirus-betsy-devos-mckinsey-corporate-education-reform.
[55] “National Coronavirus Recovery Commission Launches to ‘Save Lives and Livelihoods,’” The Heritage Foundation, April 6, 2020, heritage.org/press/national-coronavirus-recovery-commission-launches-save-lives-and-livelihoods.
[56] Andrew Ujifusa, “Four Things to Know About Betsy DeVos’ COVID-19 Grants for Parents, States,” EdWeek, April 30, 2020, https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2020/04/betsy-devos-CARES-act-grants-coronavirus-four-things.html.
[57] Surgey, “Secretary DeVos.”
[58] “Scott and Chairman Alexander Introduce School Choice Now Act,” Tim Scott, United States Senator, July 22, 2020, https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/scott-and-chairman-alexander-introduce-school-choice-now-act.
[59] Camera, “High Court.”
[60] Betsy DeVos, “Betsy DeVos: Religious liberty in our schools must be protected,” USA Today, January 17, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/17/betsy-devos-religious-liberty-schools-protected-first-amendment-column/4488287002/.
[61] “Secretary DeVos on Espinoza: Religious Discrimination is Dead,” US Department of Education, June 30, 2020, ed.gov/news/press-releases/secretary-devos-espinoza-religious-discrimination-dead.
[62] “Conservative Supreme Court opens the door for DeVos’s voucher schemes,” National Education Association, June 30, 2020, http://www.nea.org/home/76290.htm.
[63] “Exemptions from Title IX,” US Department of Education, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/t9-rel-exempt/index.html.
[64] “Murray, Democrats Push Departments of Education and Labor to Withdraw Rules Allowing for Federally Sanctioned Discrimination,” U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pension, February 19, 2020, https://www.help.senate.gov/ranking/newsroom/press/murray-democrats-push-departments-of-education-and-labor-to-withdraw-rules-allowing-for-federally-sanctioned-discrimination-.
[65] Annie Waldman, “DeVos Has Scuttled More Than 1,200 Civil Rights Probes Inherited From Obama,” ProPublica, June 21, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/devos-has-scuttled-more-than-1-200-civil-rights-probes-inherited-from-obama.
[66] Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, “Panel on Title IX, Betsy DeVos, and Men’s Rights Activists,” YouTube, May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eMQ27K-h8.
[67] Erica L. Green, “DeVos Abandons a Lifetime of Local Advocacy to Demand Schools Reopen,” The New York Times, July 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/politics/betsy-devos-schools-coronavirus.html.
[68] Green, “DeVos Funnels Coronavirus Relief Funds.”
[69] Camera, “Trump School Funding.”
[70] Linda Jacobson, “Trump Calls Off Negotiations Over COVID-19 Relief Package, Leaving Educators Anxious Over State Budget Cuts in Faltering Economy,” The 74 Million, October 1, 2020 (updated October 6, 2020), https://www.the74million.org/article/with-hopes-fading-for-another-covi…
[71] Melinda Wenner Moyer, “Pods, Microschools and Tutors: Can Parents Solve the Education Crisis on Their Own?” The New York Times, July 22, 2020, nytimes.com/2020/07/22/parenting/school-pods-coronavirus.html.
[72] Aliyya Swaby, “As school reopenings falter, some Texas parents hire private teachers. Others can only afford to cross their fingers,” The Texas Tribune, July 23, 2020 https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/23/homeschool-texas-schools-reopening/; Kerry McDonald, “Pandemic Pods” Make Homeschooling Easier For Parents and Profitable for Teachers,” Foundation for Economic Education, July 23, 2020, https://fee.org/articles/pandemic-pods-make-homeschooling-easier-for-parents-and-profitable-for-teachers/.
Sidebar
[1] Nicole Bedera, “Trump’s New Rule Governing College Sex Assault Is Nearly Impossible for Survivors to Use. That’s the Point,” TIME, May 14, 2020, https://time.com/5836774/trump-new-title-ix-rules/.
[2] Erika Williams, “Blue States Take Feds to Court Over College Sexual Assault Rules,” Courthouse News Service, June 4, 2020, https://www.courthousenews.com/blue-states-take-feds-to-court-over-college-sexual-assault-rules/.
[3] Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, “Panel on Title IX, Betsy DeVos, and Men’s Rights Activists,” May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eMQ27K-h8, 10:14.
[4] Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, “Panel on Title IX, Betsy DeVos, and Men’s Rights Activists,” May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eMQ27K-h8,10:30.
[5] Nicole Bedera, “Trump’s New Rule Governing College Sex Assault Is Nearly Impossible for Survivors to Use. That’s the Point” Time, May 14, 2020, https://time.com/5836774/trump-new-title-ix-rules/.
[6] Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, “Panel on Title IX, Betsy DeVos, and Men’s Rights Activists,” May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eMQ27K-h8, 10:14.
[7] “Questions and Answers Regarding the Department’s Final Title IX Rule,” U.S. Department of Education, September 4, 2020, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/qa-titleix-20200904.pdf.
[8] Greta Anderson, “Legal Challenges on Many Fronts,” Inside Higher Ed, July 13, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/13/understanding-lawsuits-against-new-title-ix-regulations.
[9] Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, “Panel on Title IX, Betsy DeVos, and Men’s Rights Activists,” May 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eMQ27K-h8, 12:55.
[10] Hélène Barthélemy, “How Men’s Rights Groups Helped Rewrite Regulations on Campus Rape,” August 14, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/betsy-devos-title-ix-mens-rights/.
[11] Alex DiBranco, “Mobilizing Misogyny,” The Public Eye, March 08, 2017, https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/03/08/mobilizing-misogyny.
[12] Press Team, “Campus Civil Liberties Coalition Files Petition To Defend Title IX Free Speech, Due Process Protections Against State Attorneys General Lawsuit,” June 26, 2020, https://www.iwf.org/2020/06/26/campus-civil-liberties-coalition-files-petition-to-defend-title-ix-free-speech-due-process-protections-against-state-attorneys-general-lawsuit/; Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, “Form 990-PF for period ending December 2018,” ProPublica.
[13] Daniel Moattar, “The Dark Money Behind Campus Speech Wars,” The Nation, July 9, 2018 https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/dark-money-behind-campus-speech-wars/.
[14] Heron Greenesmith, “Betsy DeVos Is Complicit in Evangelical Right’s Assault on Trans Athletes,” Truthout, June 5, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/betsy-devos-is-complicit-in-evangelical-rights-assault-on-trans-athletes/.