an astounding
moment.”
By the end of her
first year, DeVos had
adopted a defensive crouch. Her con-
gressional appearances were rare, and
she’d often repeat the same innocuous
responses when pressed by Democrats—
how she cared about all students and
was just following the law—who, in
fairness to DeVos, often seemed more
intentontrippingherupthanhear-
ingwhatshehadtosay.Thencameher
disastrousMarch2018 appearance on
60 Minutes, in which she seemed con-
fused about Michigan’s educational
progress or lack thereof. The White
House noticed. A presidential aide
called one of DeVos’s people to say that
Trump thought the interview was a
catastrophe, says one person familiar
with the situation. (Hill, DeVos’s spokes-
woman, says, “I did not receive that
call.”) After that, DeVos tended to talk to
friendlier media such as Fox News and
the Weekly Standard, along with local
reporters in such places as Benton, Ky.,
and Tulsa, who might not grill her like
their Washington counterparts.
Her efforts to promote school choice
on Capitol Hill didn’t fare much better.
Her allies talked about including a tax
credit to benefit privately funded local
school vouchers in the Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act, but it never made it into the final56
bill.DeVossettledfora weakermea-
surelettingparentsusemoneyintax-
advantagedcollegesavingsaccountsfor
privateschool.Sheconcedesthishelps
onlyfamilieswhoalreadyhaveenough
moneyfortuition,notthelower-income
oneswhomshefrequentlyarguesneed
accesstoprivateeducationthemost.
Earlierthisyear,DeVoshelda press
conferenceextollinglegislationtocre-
atea $5billion-a-year tax credit to sup-
port a variety of locally run school
choice initiatives, including subsidized
private school. It doesn’t seem to be
going anywhere: House Democrats are
dead set against it. So far, Trump’s sup-
port hasn’t exactly been full-throated,
either. He seemed disinterested when
DeVos briefed him on it, says a source
familiar with the meeting, adding that
this was indicative of his lack of interest
in education, not a knock on DeVos. Hill,
her spokeswoman, disputes this, saying
Trump personally signed off on it. “The
first thing he asks [DeVos] almost every
time they talk is, ‘How are we coming on
school choice?,’ ” she says.Still, there was much DeVos could do
within the department that didn’t
require legislation. Under Obama the
department had taken an expansive
approach to protecting minorities,
campus sexual assault victims, and stu-
dents who had suffered at the hands of
unscrupulous for-profit college opera-
tors. It was not without controversy and
had a distinct social justice underpin-
ning. “Every one of those issues, it was
always about trying to fight for the pow-
erless, those that were being hurt by the
system,” says Arne Duncan, Obama’s
longest-serving education secretary.
To hear DeVos tell it, the Obama
people had turned the departmentinto a lab for dubious social and legal
experimentation. She was particularly
galled by the administration’s habit of
advancing its policies by sending guid-
ance letters to schools rather than going
through the formal regulation process,
which would have required the depart-
ment to seek public comment.
These letters were much easier to
rescind than actual rules, though, and
soon after DeVos arrived, she began
doing so. Most notably, she pulled back
a letter advising colleges to handle sexual
assault cases by adopting a lower stan-
dard of evidence favoring accusers. It
had been welcomed by survivors’ rights
groups, but advocates on both the right
and the left argued it had the potential
to infringe on the rights of the accused.
DeVos did the same in 2018 with a let-
ter warning schools that they would face
civil rights investigations if they disci-
plined minority students at higher rates
than whites, regardless of whether overt
racial bias could be proven.
It seemed harder for her to jus-
tify her equally zealous unraveling of
the Obama administration’s efforts to
rein in the for-profit college industry.
Naturally, DeVos,whotoldanaudience
in 2015 that“governmentreallysucks”
has long beeninterestedinfree-mar-
ket educational alternatives, but for-
profit colleges have been plagued by
scandal. A Senate investigation in 2012
detailed how many of the industry’s top
chains, which relied on federal dollars,
including student loans and Pell Grants,
for the bulk of their income had used
boiler room tactics to recruit lower-in-
come students. Some also misrepre-
sented their graduation rates and their
ability to place pupils in jobs lucrative
enough for them to pay off their debt.
The fly-by-night nature of some of the71%Michigan16%National●Charter
managementschoolsby
◼ type
Independent
◼Nonprofit schools
◼ operators
For-profit operators