As DeVos exits, where does education go next?
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is one of the highest profile Cabinet members to resign from President Donald Trump’s administration, writing in the wake of the rampage at the Capitol, “Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us.”
“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote to the president on Jan. 7.
Her departure on Friday was a dramatic finale for one of the longest-serving, and most controversial, members of President Trump’s senior administrative team – ending one of the most highly charged tenures in the history of the Education Department.
For four years, scholars say, Ms. DeVos used the bully pulpit of the department to fundamentally shift the American conversation around schools. In her dogged pursuit of what many saw as a radical, free market approach, she unraveled a decadeslong truce between Republicans and Democrats when it came to education policy. She advocated for school choice, including vouchers for private and parochial schools, and regularly
A messenger, a lightning rodPart of a larger changeA legacy of ed policy changes