When Betsy DeVos attended Calvin College, she knew that she wanted to work in politics and education reform. She started working with President Gerald R. Ford and by the 1990s, she had created her own education program. She championed educational choice as a way for students to have more options.
Educational choice became controversial as many saw it as a way to send public funds to private schools. However, DeVos has refuted this notion many times, most recently in an interview with “60 Minutes” and Leslie Stahl in 2018. Despite her critics, she has championed student choice.
She has also brought several donors on board, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Sam Walton. She has donated over $35 million to educational causes herself, including student choice.
However, before her time as the U.S. Secretary of Education, she was working with Louisiana and Florida to expand the state’s educational choice programs. At one point, these were the only two states to have extensive educational choice programs. It wasn’t until DeVos started working with state legislators and proposing student choice that she was able to bring more states on board.
By the end of her term in 2021, she had all 50 states on board with educational choice. Now all students could essentially choose where they wanted to go to school. These programs would include magnet schools, private schools, charter schools, and virtual schools.
Virtual schools and distance learning programs became more important with the pandemic of 2020. As COVID-19 closed schools, DeVos implemented new distance learning policies to help students and teachers continue their work throughout the pandemic.
Now that she is moving on from her role as U.S. Secretary of Education, DeVos said she hopes the new administration keeps her policies in place as it helps students go to better schools.
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