Betsy DeVos

née Elisabeth Prince (born 1958)

“No school is as great as it can be.”

Years in political office: 1996–2000, 2003–2005, 2017–present

Position: US secretary of education, 2017–present; chair of the Michigan Republican Party, 1996–2000, 2003–2005

Party affiliation: Republican

Hometown: Holland, Michigan

Top causes: school choice, reducing the size of the government, and vocational education

Life Story

Betsy DeVos grew up in West Michigan Dutch country in a town where, by some accounts, the company started by her father, Edgar Prince, employed a quarter of the population. Her dad invented the light-up vanity mirror used in cars’ sun visors, an innovation that made his family quite wealthy, and with his money, he became one of the country’s biggest donors to the Christian Right. She went to private Christian schools all the way up to her college graduation. In 1976 she volunteered on Gerald Ford’s 1976 presidential reelection campaign. She married Richard (Dick) DeVos Jr., son of the family (net worth $5.6 billion) that cofounded the Amway company.

The well-monied couple first started thinking about the United States educational system in earnest when they sent their oldest son to school. They opted for a private, faith-based institution, but also decided to support a 90 percent benefactor-funded, private religious school in Grand Rapids that was attended by many students from low-income families of color and where DeVos began to volunteer. The experience taught her that many poor families didn’t have the money to make the same painstaking decision that the DeVoses had made over where to send their kids to school. “It became a matter of fairness to me,” she says.

The DeVoses envisioned a future in which families could get tax dollars through voucher programs to take their kids out of struggling public schools and enroll them in privately run charter schools. Critics say this would mean public schools would get less funding, putting the education of millions of low-income, developmentally disadvantaged, and rural kids who can’t attend charter schools at serious risk. Inspired by the possibilities of what came to be known as “school choice” and endowed with the connections to wealthy donors and politicians that their own money brought, the DeVos family rose in Michigan’s political ranks. On the promise of providing fairness in education, DeVos became her county’s Republican chair, then a four-term state chairperson of the party. Her husband was the Republicans’ 2006 nominee for governor.

The couple were philanthropists, donating large sums to schools that were usually private and faith-based. In 2017 the DeVos clan divulged that its five family foundations had donated a lifetime total of $1 billion to conservative and Christian politicians, committees, and organizations. “We do expect something in return,” wrote DeVos in an op-ed on giving. “We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump proposed giving $20 billion in private school vouchers to parents throughout the country. When he won the election, DeVos’s allies, Vice President Mike Pence and Jeb Bush (son of school choice champion President George H. W. Bush), suggested that Trump tap DeVos for his administration. He appointed her secretary of education. DeVos had finally seen a serious return on her family’s support of the Republican Party.

What’s on Her Agenda

For all her passion for education, a soft-spoken and polite DeVos stumbled, and often, during her confirmation to the post. In Senate hearings, she expressed a lack of understanding of important concepts about her proposed job, and at one point said guns were needed in schools to “protect from potential grizzlies.” (Yes, bears, which are apparently a problem at a rural school with whose administrators DeVos is friendly.) “I think I was undercoached,” she would later say, in reference to the Trump administration for not giving her enough concrete information on its policies.

Her commitment to faith-based education in a secular government system made her a controversial appointee and gave her a far higher media profile than any past education secretary had held. She was confirmed by a hair—Republican senators Lisa Murkowski (page 132) and Susan Collins (page 30) voted against DeVos, leaving Pence to cast the first tiebreaking vote for a government appointee’s confirmation in the country’s history. Shortly after she assumed office, protesters who thought her noted support for Christian causes would lead to a deterioration in the nation’s educational system physically blocked her from her first public school visit in Washington, DC. Her first budget request—which would have made large cuts elsewhere in the educational system to fund school choice programs—was denied.

During her first two years in office, DeVos mainly focused on rolling back many of the previous Obama administration’s diversity protections, which she saw as an example of overreach by the former president. She withdrew memos that encouraged schools to allow trans students to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity and that shifted the burden of truth onto alleged predators—rather than alleged victims—in sexual assault allegations. She has greatly limited the number of students who qualify for federal loan forgiveness programs and argued that high levels of federal spending on public education over the last decades has seen meager results. DeVos has proposed every year to cut funding to Special Olympics, a vastly unpopular prospect that was even dismissed by Trump in 2019 in a public dustup.

DeVos's beliefs represent a considerable segment of US society that, like nearly everyone else, is concerned over the state of the educational system. Since her early days of volunteering, she’s shown a commitment to her ideals and a passion for making change.

Awesome Achievements

• When the first federal budget cut to the Special Olympics was proposed, DeVos—who had made an appearance at one of the organization’s events two weeks earlier—donated a quarter of her salary to the organization.
• In 2019 she broke her pelvis and hip socket in a bike accident but continued to work and make public appearances in a wheelchair.
• DeVos donates her entire government paycheck to charity. She also pays for her own security and travel expenses incurred by her trips by private plane.

Quotables

“My faith motivates me to really try to work on behalf of and advocate for those who are least able to advocate for themselves.”

“As much as many in the media use my name as clickbait or try to make it all about me, it’s not.”

“I entered public life to promote policies that empower all families. Notice that I said families—families, not government.”