The Donald Trump-Mike Pence Transition has gained a new potential cabinet member: longtime Michigan charter school advocate Betsy DeVos.
But she’s not just pro-charters. She’s part of the famed Amway DeVos family, which has a checkered history with the LGBT community.
“Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passion¬ate education advocate,” Trump said. “Under her leadership we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families. I am pleased to nominate Betsy as Secretary of the Department of Education.”
DeVos may help implement Trump’s campaign promise to eliminate the federal DOE. She could also direct the department’s Office of Civil Rights to reduce or eliminate protections for LGBT students, particularly transgender students, enacted under President Obama. Trump was particularly vehement about
those protections, during his recent presidential campaign.
Randi Weingarten, a lesbian and president of the American Federation of Teachers, said DeVos is “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee put forward” in the DOE’s history.
“In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America,” Weingarten said. “DeVos has no meaningful experience in the classroom or in our schools. The sum total of her involvement has been spending her family’s wealth in an effort to dismantle public education in Michigan. Every American should be concerned that she would impose her reckless and extreme ideology on the nation.”
But DeVos and her family also have a history of opposing LGBT rights. DeVos and her husband Dick DeVos lobbied fellow businesspersons to make sure an anti-gay marriage amendment was placed on the 2004 Michigan ballot; he contributed more than $200,000 to the successful campaign. Dick DeVos also contributed $100,000 in 2008 to pass Florida’s successful Amendment Proposition 2, which banned same-sex marriage in the state.
The DeVos’s family foundation gave half a million dollars in 2009 to the National Organization for Marriage. Betsy DeVos’s father, Edgar Prince, was a co¬founder of the Family Research Council, one of America’s most ardent anti-LGBT organizations.
Jon Davidson, legal director for Lambda Legal said his organization is
“quite concerned” about DeVos, “another arch-conservative who is totally out of the mainstream. Lambda Legal plans to monitor closely any changes sought to be made by the Education Department and the Trump administration generally on protections of LGBT students against discrimination and bullying, as well as other issues that could affect our and allied communities, and to fight to preserve the gains we have made.”
Among Lambda’s biggest fears: DeVos could reverse the DOE’s “guidance” efforts to schools that discrimination against transgender students amounts to a violation of Title IX (Education Amendments of 1972). That guidance, which Trump promised during his presidential campaign to rescind, required schools to allow transgender students to use the restroom consistent with their gender identity, among other policies geared toward open acceptance of all transgender students’ full rights in school settings.
