By Christine Rosen
Monday, January 25, 2021
When Donald Trump named Betsy DeVos his
choice for secretary of education in 2016, the mainstream media labeled her
unfit for the office. They especially disliked her support for school vouchers
and charter schools, which the New York
Times described at the time not as an innovative alternative to a sclerotic
and failing public-education system but as a “philosophy that abandoned poorer
families.” The Washington Post’s
education reporter, Valerie Strauss, agreed, describing DeVos as “the most
polarizing education secretary nominee ever.”
The Times
and other media outlets continued their criticism during DeVos’s confirmation
hearings in 2017, calling her performance inept and excoriating her for
suggesting that decisions about education are better left to state and local
officials as opposed to federal bureaucrats. They gleefully attacked her for
her family’s wealth. A typical Times
assessment: “More than anyone else who has joined the incoming Trump
administration, she represents the combination of wealth, free-market ideology
and political hardball associated with a better-known family of billionaires:
Charles and David Koch.” Reporters eagerly gathered quotes from disgruntled
political opponents, including one in Michigan who compared DeVos to his
toddler granddaughter. Both “turned into spoiled little brats when they were
told no,” the Times reported.
Once the Senate confirmed DeVos, the media
doubled down on their image of her as the Education Department’s resident
villain. In a piece in August 2017, the Washington
Post’s Strauss wrote, “It is tempting to conclude that after six months as
education secretary, Betsy DeVos hasn’t accomplished all that much.”
But it’s only “tempting” if your
ideological bias is as entrenched as Strauss’s clearly was. Even she had to
admit that, “like it or not, DeVos has taken some major steps to change
education policy,” which is typically what happens when one political party
gains power after eight years of the other party’s policies, but it was an
astonishing surprise to Strauss.
In fact, what angered the media from the
first day of DeVos’s tenure as secretary was not her policy positions so much
as her refusal to play the role of cheerleader to public schools and teachers’
unions, as Democrats typically do and as the left-leaning media expects.
Instead, DeVos spoke bluntly about the problems facing public schools and the
innovations that might solve them. As Strauss complained, “DeVos’s
denunciations of the federal government and her refusal to make even a tepid
call-out to the value of the public education system, can’t help but have an
effect on the way some Americans feel about their neighborhood public schools,
which educate the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren.”
It’s doubtful that pandering to the
media’s need for aspirational chatter about public schools would have spared
DeVos the heavily biased reporting about her tenure, but it points to a deeper
problem with the mainstream media’s role during Republican administrations: the
tendency to claim incompetence or evil on the part of Republican officials
rather than make a good-faith effort to understand political and policy
disagreements.
Consider the New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who made DeVos a frequent
subject of her opinion columns, going so far as to sponsor a Worst Trump
Cabinet Member reader poll in June 2017 that named DeVos the winner. Collins
wrote approvingly of the results, which focused less on policy disagreements
than on personal attacks: “Many readers noted that our secretary of education
does not seem to be. . . all that bright.”
In a May 2020 column contest for “worst
political person” (Collins expanded her contest franchise as the Trump years
wore on), she wrote: “I want to put a word in here for Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos, who is often unfairly overlooked when it comes to counting
terrible people in the current government. This is because of her general ineptitude,
and you should thank God every day this woman doesn’t know how to get things
done.”
But if DeVos couldn’t get things done, how
to explain the fact that this January, Collins’s employer featured on the Times’ editorial page a lengthy scolding
of DeVos for doing too much? “The departing education secretary, Betsy DeVos,
will be remembered as perhaps the most disastrous leader in the Education
Department’s history,” the editorial board wrote, adding that her “lack of
vision has been apparent in a variety of contexts.”
It’s not DeVos’s lack of vision the Times objects to; it was her unwillingness
to play along with the liberal narrative about federal education policy. The Times editorial page spent paragraph
after paragraph criticizing DeVos for saying that state and local governments
were the ones to make decisions about keeping schools closed during the
pandemic, for example. They complained that Joe Biden’s new secretary of
education will have to find ways to deal with the “learning loss” caused by
school closures and, by implication, DeVos’s failure to use federal authority
the way they believe she should have. Nowhere did the Times mention the main driver of school closures and subpar
remote-learning plans, which also happens to be the interest group that
constituted DeVos’s most outspoken critic for the past four years: teachers’
unions.
The Times
also breezed past what has arguably been among DeVos’s most important
accomplishments as secretary: her restoration of due process with regard to
Title IX and sexual-harassment and sexual-assault claims on college campuses.
DeVos undid Obama-era guidance regarding sexual-harassment and sexual-assault
claims made under Title IX that even many liberal observers (such as the New Yorker’s Jeannie Suk Gersen) had
criticized for their ideologically motivated reasoning and presumption of guilt
of the accused. And she did so using the appropriate channels of governance
that the Obama administration had deliberately discarded in favor of
bureaucratic fiat: the rule-making process that allowed for public comment and
debate.
DeVos took a similar tack with regard to
rescinding Obama-era policies directing schools that transgender students
should be allowed to choose the bathrooms and locker rooms that conformed with
their “gender identity.” DeVos’s education department also informed the state
of Connecticut that it was in violation of federal law when it allowed
biologically male athletes to compete in women’s sports.
DeVos additionally transformed the debate
over discipline in public schools by rescinding the “restorative justice”
policies pursued during the Obama administration—policies that, as with Title
IX and sexual-assault allegations, Obama officials had made via guidance
letters rather than normal rule-making procedures.
During his campaign for president, Joe
Biden said repeatedly that he would reinstate the Obama-era guidance on
discipline, even though it hampered schools’ ability to deal with unruly and
disruptive students. Under that guidance, some schools had stopped suspending repeat offenders for fear
of losing federal funding and facing federal investigation by Obama’s
Department of Education. And he has promised to roll back due-process rights in
Title IX sexual-assault and harassment cases, as well.
In the end, DeVos’s tenure as secretary
will have succeeded in merely pausing the most aggressive federal-government
overreach in education, but that in itself was no small feat. As Max Eden at
the Manhattan Institute has noted, “from how elementary schools regulate
bathrooms to how college campuses investigate sexual-assault allegations, many
of the flash points in our national political debates have been intensified by
unelected Department of Education bureaucrats interpreting long-standing civil
rights law as a basis to enforce the latest social-justice cause.”
Which is why what the Times calls “wreckage” is, for small-government conservatives and
those concerned with the growing radicalism of social-justice ideologues, a
strong record for which even voters who disliked Trump should be grateful.
Despite unfair media treatment and the usual bureaucratic intransigence, DeVos
was able to do in four years what few thought could be accomplished in two
terms. And she did so without compromising her principles or abusing her
bureaucratic power as the Obama administration had done. She moved the ball forward
on a number of long-overdue educational reforms as well as expanding the
national conversation around school choice and charter schools. And she did all
of this while serving a difficult president and facing a hostile media. You can
call her polarizing, but don’t dare call DeVos incompetent.
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