Betsy DeVos Has Some Thoughts On Trump 2.0

Betsy DeVos, former US Secretary of Education and lifelong rich education privatizer, talked to Alyson Klein at Education Week about the upcoming Trump administration. It's brief interview, but long enough for her to rewrite the past, ignore the present, and fantasize about the future.

DeVos sees the second Trump administration as a continuation of the first, and sure, maybe. She doesn't know what Trump is going to do. I don't know. You don't know. Probably not even Trump, with his increasingly impaired goldfish-like faculties, knows. Sure there's Project 2025, but that's over 900 pages long and he's not going to read it. I can make a few predictions will stage a high-profile round up of immigrants in some city (like Aurora, Colorado), declare the immigrant crime problem solved, and give all the rich folks who depend on migrant labor for their business a wink and a smile. He will take the booming Biden economy and declare it the Trump economy. But who knows-- what he chooses to do next will depend a lot on whose voice he's listening to at the time.

Anyway, Betsy thinks that the time is ripe for the federal tax credit scholarship program that she couldn't sell last time. She still thinks that there is support, not just among members of Congress, but "broadly" because the pandemic opened peoples' eyes blah blah blah. However, despite this supposed "broad" support, she should note that three states had choice and vouchers on the ballot, and in all three states, voters rejected vouchers. And they rejected them hardest in the same states that went hard for Trump. 

But that's okay, Like most privatizers, she's not really counting on that "broad" support.

The environment is completely changed.

I think more members of Congress and [their staff] are more informed about what education freedom really is, and what it means, and how it can actually be implemented through a federal tax credit, not creating any new federal bureaucracies or departments or agencies or anything.

People don't have to support federal vouchers. Just legislators.

Of course, as folks who work in government, legislators and their staffs are also smart enough to know that this "not creating any new federal bureaucracies or departments or agencies or anything" stuff is pure baloney. DeVos is proposing a program where taxpayers deposit money in a fund, somewhere, and then get tax credit for it, somehow, and then money from those funds are distributed to private schools, through some process and all of it monitored somehow, maybe even a process for deciding which private providers are eligible. It would have bureaucracy out the wazoo, and add to the federal deficit, too, though I don't suppose anyone cares.

She also sees Title IX on Trump's radar, because there is no panic like trans panic (like all good trans panickers, DeVos doesn't really care about trans men).

She also sees fixing FAFSA as a priority, and she's not wrong. 

But of course top of the list is getting rid of the Department of Education. "De-powered" is her term. She uses the talking point that they just want to push the money out to the states to use as they think best. This talking point never includes the part of Project 2025 where Title 1 funds are supposed to be zeroed out entirely. 

Klein calls her on her resignation after the January 6 insurrection, an occasion on which DeVos did a fair imitation of a woman whose principles include respect for the country and the processes that keep it safe. But she would like to take all that back now. Here's what she said on January 7, after saying they should be highlighting their great accomplishments:

Instead, we are left to clean up the meds caused by violent protestors overrunning the U,S, Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people's business. That behavior is unconscionable for our country. There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.

Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us. I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgement and model the behavior we hope they would emulate. They must know from us that America is greater than what transpired today. To that end, today, I resign from my position...

Here's what she told Klein:

If you recall, my resignation was specifically out of concern for putting myself in the seat of young kids and families. There was an opportunity to lead in a different way, to say things at more opportune times. I felt strongly that we had accomplished many good things, and that we should be talking about those things as we left office.

I know that President Trump has a heart for America and Americans. And he has a very tender heart for kids and families who want the best for their kids.

Also, as she has now said several times publicly, she would be "very open to talking" to Trump about coming back (if he backs her preferred agenda). Way to stick to those principles! Not that she'll be invited back-- she was there likely on the pull of Mike Pence, and that plus her January 7 letter probably flunks her on the Loyalty to Beloved Leader test.

She has other folks in mind that would be great for the job. She thinks an ideal would be a governor "who's led their state in reform issues," and I'm trying to think of a privatizing governor who would like to take his career on a side trip through Trump's education department. 

Her advice for the new person is basically "set the same goals that I would." Klein also asks if DeVos has advice for them if they face angry crowds, though I reckon that it would be hard to find someone with less experience dealing with The Rabble than DeVos (an ineptness that scored her a lot of fair and unfair abuse). If DeVos demonstrated nothing else, it was that rich folks used to buying political compliance aren't very good at actual politics. 

DeVos says "change is hard" (by which I think she means "making other people change is hard") and "you just have to be willing to deal with the noise and stay focused on the vision for students." This is doubly hard when you think every other person is just a source of noise.