“And in the blue corner, fighting out of Snotsville Michigan, wearing the dollar sign trunks, and weighing in at a weak 98 pounds, the reigning world champion in the educational lightweight division, Betsy ‘The Ballcracker’ DeVooooooooos!”
These days, the well known, and properly reviled charter school champion is a bird of ruffled plumage. Like her boss, she came into this whole government gig thinking that her department would be her own personal fiefdom, with an ornate carved wooden throne, a really neat bejeweled crown, and unlimited power to abuse. And the realization that there are actual constraints on her imperious edicts, and actual work to be done is really putting a crimp in her maj jongg schedule.
Politico is reporting that this whole destruction-of-public-education shtick isn't quite what it was cracked up to be, and DeVos is not very happy in her new digs. As the story points out, it is highly unusual to see an Education Secretary surrounded by Secret Service agents, but DeVos spawns protests whenever she visits a school. In a recent visit, her arrival attracted a crowd of protesters several hundred strong. The entire student population of the school? 76 students.
Betsy DeVos holds a place of honor in US cabinet history, she is the only secretary ever to require the Vice President to cast a tie breaking vote on her nomination, and that was the high point for her. But one thing is for sure, She and Trump seem to share a pure and similar ideology. Trump blames everybody else when things go wrong for him, and so does DeVos. In this case she blames her piss poor performance in her hearing on the Trump transition team;
In retrospect, DeVos tells me, she blames the transition team for its handling of her confirmation. “I think I was undercoached,” she says. “The transition group was very circumspect about how much information they gave me about then-current policy and … it was in their view a balance between being prepared for a confirmation hearing and not having well-formed opinions on what should or shouldn’t change, so as not to get caught in a confirmation hearing making commitments that then I wouldn’t want to or be able to keep. And in hindsight, I wish I had a whole lot more information.” (italics mine)
Riiiiiight, because the best way to pass a confirmation hearing is to have no valid ideas or opinions on what the department does, or how to run or improve it. But now that she’s there, she;s finding out just how little influence she actually has over the operation of K-12 public education. As the article points out, since actual public schools only get approximately 9.1% of their funding from the federal government, federal influence is greatly muted in its effect. Where DeVos has had more effect us not in the privatization of private schools and the intellectual rape of their curriculum, it’s in the higher education system, where the government holds more sway in regulation. She has already rolled back the Obama era rules reigning in the abuses of for profit colleges, and now appears to be on a crusade to reform campus sexual assault policies, incredibly giving more protection to the accused.
DeVos seems to be disappointed in her lack of progress in radicalizing the K-12 education system to universal vouchers, and disillusioned that she doesn’t hold more sway in the process. The article was quick to point out that in reality, DeVos held more power and influence as a private, well funded citizen than she does as the secretary of Education. But it appears that parents and activists aren’t the only ones who don’t approve of her plans, even congress gave her a rough ride;
Perhaps most significant, she failed to persuade the committees of jurisdiction in Congress to approve her and the department’s budget request, which would have slashed funding to other initiatives in the name of expanding DeVos’ pet cause, school choice. It amounted to an embarrassing repudiation of a president and a secretary in their first year, when there is traditionally the most political capital to spend—especially considering Republicans control both the House and Senate.
The simple fact of the matter is that DeVos is like too many of the “best people” that Trump has brought into government; having no government experience, they don’t understand that it takes patience, guile, and relationships to get things done, and ike most Trump appointees, DeVos has none of those. DeVos herself explains away the failure as just being “only the the first budget cycle”, but why she thinks that future budget cycles will get any easier, especially if there is GOP turmoil in the 2018 cycle is beyond me. But her disappointment in the job, and her ability to influence education policy is already leading to whispers of her early departure;
“She can talk about bureaucracy and how constraining it is for her, but a Republican-controlled Congress rejected her budget proposals. She can’t fill her senior staff slots. Morale is terrible at the department,” says Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an independent education think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “And I’ll tell you, in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long. And for my money, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if she left. I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”
In fairness, the article points out that actual Education department staffers they spoke to were less strident, but not more supportive. They tended to just shrug their shoulders, she is uninspiring, but not abusive or difficult to work for. She’s just another empty suit, and they’ve all seen them come and go over the years. At this point they only wonder how long they’ll be seeing this particular suit, and what the next one will look and be like.
If DeVos goes, there is one positive to it. Like at the State Department, almost all of the top political spots are vacant. If DeVos departs, that means that the rules and procedures already in place will be followed, and the work will be done by career civil service employees, with no personal or political agenda. And at this point, seems to me that the status quo is the best we can hope for.