WASHINGTON — Despite protestations from Democrats who said Betsy DeVos will have an adverse impact on higher education, the Senate education committee on Tuesday voted to move forward with the confirmation of the billionaire philanthropist who is both lauded and lambasted for her advocacy of school choice and school vouchers.
The 12-11 vote, which split strictly along party lines, came amid Republican assurances that DeVos will divest herself of the 100 or so items that the U.S. Office of Government Ethics said could pose a conflict of interest for her as secretary of education if she does not.
The confirmation now heads to the full Senate but no date was provided at Tuesday’s hearing as to when.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, said that DeVos was the “most questioned” education secretary nominee in history, since Democrats posed nearly 1,400 questions to her. This is a figure he said was 25 times more than the amount of questions posed to President Barack Obama’s two nominees for education secretary, Arne Duncan and John B. King Jr., respectively. Alexander and other Republican senators said DeVos deserves credit — not scorn — for using her wealth to advocate for school choice and vouchers so that students from low-income families can have the same educational options as students from wealthy families.
However, Democrats maintained that DeVos was the most unqualified education secretary nominee and said she deserved the intense scrutiny because of her vast investments, including in for-profit education companies, and has pushed for charters and vouchers for schools without adequate accountability.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., accused DeVos of hiding “shady investments” from the committee and criticized DeVos for using her “vast fortune to push her own ideology.”
“Not only are her ideas completely uniformed by experience with public schools, but the evidence is clear that her privatization theories are bad for students,” Warren said.
