Trump’s U.S. Education Secretary pick: A choice advocate with Florida ties

President-elect Donald Trump wants a prominent school choice advocate to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education.

His decision to appoint Betsy DeVos, the chairman of the American Federation for Children, is widely being interpreted as a sign the Trump administration, along with a friendly Republican Congress, will use federal policy to aggressively push for expanded educational choice.

DeVos has some notable Florida ties. Among other things, her family owns the Orlando Magic.

And in interviews, including this one, she has often held up the Sunshine State’s choice approach as a model.

“I always cite Florida as, really, the furthest along in terms of providing the widest range of choices and the greatest access to those choices of any state in the country, and from a political standpoint, having real bipartisan support for these choices,” she said in an interview last year with Ed Pozzuoli, a South Florida attorney who’s a big backer of charter schools.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that former Governor Jeb Bush is a fan of the pick. Democrats for Education Reform, meanwhile, sharply criticized some of Trump’s positions but applauded DeVos’ support for charter schools.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.