Next month, Betsy DeVos will close out her run as the nation’s eleventh secretary of education. DeVos’s tenure has been unprecedented in many ways, from her outsider status to her contentious confirmation to the devastating pandemic that upended American education over the last year. I recently had the chance to chat with her about what she’s taken from the experience.
DeVos, a longtime champion of school choice and critic of traditional public-school systems, was greeted by an unrelenting fusillade of criticism from the very beginning. Most who’ve previously filled her office have been treated gently by the press and politicians. But her nomination had barely been announced before the New York Times ran a scathing critique blaming her for the state of Detroit’s schools, even though she’d never held any position with power over education in the city (or Michigan, for that matter).
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