What Has Betsy DeVos Accomplished? Part II
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Yesterday’s post covered Betsy DeVos’s record as U.S. Secretary of Education—examining her failed quest to privatize the public schools and Congress’s success in blocking her K-12 agenda. But there are other important departmental responsibilities. DeVos has also turned her attention to deregulation.
DeVos has set out to expunge Obama-era rules and guidance protecting students’ civil rights in public schools. She has also quietly erased protection for college students in predatory for-profit colleges and trade schools whose operating budgets depend for their very survival on their ability to market themselves to students who will bring federal loans, grants, and Veterans’ program dollars. However, again and again, her Department’s justification for cancelling or delaying Obama rules has been blocked by the courts.
Court challenges have forced DeVos’s staff to continue enforcing civil rights protections in public schools and to continue cracking down on predatory for-profit colleges. Politico‘s Michael Stratford describes a long list of failures by DeVos’s department to rescind Obama-era rules: “Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s attempts to swiftly roll back major Obama-era policies at her agency are hitting a roadblock: federal courts. Judges have rebuffed DeVos’ attempts to change Obama policies dealing with everything from student loan forgiveness to mandatory arbitration agreements to racial disparities in special education programs. As a result, the Education Department is being forced to carry out Obama-era policies that the Trump administration had been fighting to stop—stymying DeVos’ efforts to quickly impose a conservative imprint on federal education policy over the past two years.”
In many cases, courts have blocked DeVos’s efforts to deregulate on procedural grounds. DeVos’s staff people are accused of failing to follow the requirements for changing federal rules and guidance. Stratford summarizes Toby Merrill’s reaction to DeVos’s rule changes. Merrill is the director of the Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, an organization that has challenged, along with the attorneys general of several states, several of DeVos’s attempts to rescind or delay Obama-era rules: “Every administration has wins and losses in court, Merrill said, but most have done better at making sure they follow the legal rules of the road for rulemaking.” Merrill explains: “It speaks to the Department of Education’s unwillingness or inability to follow the basic law around how federal agencies conduct themselves… At the very least, they cross their Ts and dot their Is and therefore are CONTINUE READING: What Has Betsy DeVos Accomplished? Part II | janresseger
