Few members of President Trump’s Cabinet are as reviled by liberals as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. That may seem strange, given the relatively small impact that department has on the federal budget and the fact that DeVos can’t be even remotely linked to the Russian collusion story that Democrats are trying to use to invalidate the 2016 election results.
But despite the seemingly small stakes involved in her corner of the government, the wealthy education reform activist has been a piñata for left-wing activists.
As Trump looks to build on the momentum generated by the Senate’s passing of the GOP tax-reform bill, he ought to take a cue from his foes and invest more political capital in DeVos’ crusade for school choice.
The heat on Devos in her first months in office has been intense. She’s been widely lampooned as an ignorant dilettante. That’s a lie, since she has devoted much of her life and her considerable resources to the cause of improving education by giving parents the ability to take their kids out of failing public schools and put them into schools that give them a chance to succeed.
It’s an effort that is of particular importance to minority and poor families who are trapped in inner cities where a better education is often the only ticket out of a cycle of poverty that stretches across generations.
DeVos believes tax dollars ought to follow the students wherever they go to school, rather than just being the entitlement of the education bureaucracy to spend as they wish.
Forcing schools to compete encourages excellence. But despite the often-heroic efforts of many public-school teachers, that’s the last thing the education establishment and the teachers unions want. It’s DeVos’ advocacy for reforms that will help students and families, and not her vast wealth, that has put the target on her back.
Not surprisingly, DeVos has made little progress toward her goal since local municipalities and states largely control education policy, not Washington.
But another reason seems to be the unwillingness of many minorities to join forces with the administration even on an issue where their best interests are clearly at odds with the liberal politicians, media outlets and unions that are doing their best to ensure Trump and DeVos fail.
To date, DeVos’s only victory was a provision in the tax-reform package that allowed parents to use their 529 college-savings plans for K-12 private or parochial education. But while this is a step in the right direction, critics of the measure are right when they say it won’t help poor families.
DeVos has tried to get Congress to allocate funding for a variety of school-choice and voucher initiatives around the country that will help the poor. She’s also sought to get backing for a national tax-credit scholarship plan.
Similar schemes have made a real difference in states like Florida and Pennsylvania toward giving more poor children the opportunity to get a better education instead of languishing in public schools that the bureaucrats have little incentive to improve.
But Congress has largely ignored her pleas. If Trump is looking to show that he cares about more than pleasing his base, backing DeVos’ initiatives should be a priority in 2018.
This is about more than Trump, DeVos or the “resistance.” If there’s any domestic issue where we ought to hope the two parties could rise above the contemporary spirit of hyper-partisanship, it’s education.
Expecting any segment of the Democrats’ political coalition to cross the aisle to work with Trump when he is so unpopular may be a fantasy. But expanding school choice is a matter of recognizing that education should be about the best interests of children, not bureaucracies or unions.
Those who can afford good schools for their kids must ask themselves whether those children who might benefit from school-choice programs advocated by DeVos are made in the image of God, like our own.
If Trump is looking for a fight worth having, he needs to lay off Twitter and join her in taking on a cynical liberal education establishment and its Democrat enablers who — despite their supposed sympathy for the poor — continue to deny the pleas of parents for school choice.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review.
Twitter: @jonathans_tobin