Greg Toppo

USATODAY

As U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ rocky confirmation process drew to a close this week, opponents, including parents, teachers, unions and politicians, railed against her. Their calls to senators, one Hawaii lawmaker tweeted, made for the busiest three-day period in Capitol switchboard history. On Wednesday, one day after the U.S. Senate approved her appointment with a tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence, even high school students walked out classes to rise up in protest.

But those Pittsburgh high school students, who descended on Sen. Pat Toomey's office, could go years without feeling the effects of a Department of Education policy.

While her inexperience with public education set critics’ teeth on edge — DeVos and her family attended private schools, she has championed private-school vouchers and some critics warned that she’ll bring about nothing less than the downfall of the USA’s vast public education system — it's unclear how much influence the U.S. Department of Education will have over how schools operate.

Now that she’s officially on the job, what should families expect?

The question is not so easy to answer.

Most of the day-to-day power — over curriculum, instruction, safety, teacher preparation and even much-maligned standardized tests — lies with states and local school districts. In fact, the legacy of the Obama administration may have been to shift even more power to states and school districts and away from the federal government.

And any plans by President Donald Trump to make big changes in schools would most likely need a helping of cash — and Congress’ approval.

On the campaign trail, Trump rarely talked about education except to criticize urban school districts. But in September he proposed handing taxpayer funds to families so they can send their kids to the public, magnet, charter or private school of their choice. He said the plan would benefit 11 million low-income children, who would receive about $12,000 apiece each year.

The proposed federal contribution? An eye-popping $20 billion, more than the department spends each year to educate low-income children.

“It is a big number,” said Nina Rees, a former deputy undersecretary under President George W. Bush who now serves as president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The money, she said, would somehow have to come from a Republican-controlled Congress, which is in no mood to spend more on education. Even proposals to somehow channel the money through tax credits or federal savings accounts likely won’t fly with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is trying to simplify the USA’s tax code.

And Rees said her organization, which supports school choice, has made it clear it doesn’t want the money to come out of programs that serve poor and disabled students.

“If you have new money on the table, the discussions will be a little easier,” she said. But GOP lawmakers will probably settle for funding small school choice demonstration projects, such as the one that has operated for years in Washington, D.C., schools.

Joy Pullmann, managing editor of The Federalist, a right-leaning blog, has actually suggested that the worst thing DeVos and her boss could do is hand billions in federal voucher funds to private schools.

“If DeVos and Trump love school choice and the children it benefits, they will keep the federal government far, far away from them,” she wrote. The administration, she said, could potentially “destroy school choice in the name of expanding it” if some future administration sees handing over federal dollars as a way to make private schools agree to more federal regulations and testing requirements.

What about much-maligned testing regimes in schools?

Don't count on them changing soon, said Michael Cohen, a former assistant secretary under President Bill Clinton who is now president of Achieve, a Washington, D.C. non-profit organization that promotes higher academic standards. He said most schools’ standards, testing and accountability systems will be unaffected by the change in administration. And Trump's vow to end so-called Common Core testing may well ring hollow, since states must decide whether to keep or drop the tests. “Whether (DeVos) likes the Common Core or doesn’t like the Common Core — and I’ve heard both — it doesn’t matter,” he said.

The latest reauthorization of the federal law overseeing much of the department's K-12 education requirements, Cohen said, “makes quite clear that the secretary doesn’t have a role to play in state standards, that states can adopt what they want to adopt.”

But dig a little deeper, he said, and DeVos may have some power over what happens come test time each spring. States must regularly prove to the federal government that their tests meet its technical requirements — the Obama administration just last month, before it departed, sent the last of 18 letters to states to tell them they were in compliance with federal requirements.

“The question is whether the department will continue to enforce those requirements,” Cohen said. “The answer ought to be ‘Yes,’ but we’ve seen no signals one way or another on this.”

Critics' biggest worries over DeVos have been over what she'll do to the department's Office of Civil Rights, which conservatives have urged she minimize or scrap altogether. Under Obama the office took on new responsibilities and a more aggressive stance against bullying and sexual discrimination, among other issues.

Andrew Rotherham, who served as special assistant to the president for domestic policy in the Clinton administration, said it's still hard to tell what the Trump administration's priorities are around many of these issues. “They’re still learning how to run the West Wing in an effective way, and how to interact with these agencies — and frankly it’s too soon to know.”

But if DeVos can get Trump's ear on these issues, she could well persuade him to sign executive orders that could change federal policy around campus sexual assaults, as well as civil rights data collection. “Presidential attention and presidential priority are huge,” he said.

In her first remarks to Department of Education workers on Wednesday, DeVos tried to allay critics' fears, saying the department “has a unique role in protecting students. We believe students deserve learning environments that foster innovation and curiosity, and are also free from harm. I’m committed to working with you to make this the case."

Observers, including many former Obama administration officials, will likely hold her to it. Former Education Secretary John B. King, who now leads the D.C. advocacy group The Education Trust, last week told Politico: “People who care about public education, who care about equity, who care about civil rights should speak out loudly. When there seems to be a lack of clear commitment to protecting student civil rights, we’re going to speak up loudly.”

DeVos last month told lawmakers she would divest from several companies that profit from education, including a debt collection agency that does college loan-related business with the department.

Under intense questioning from Democrats during her Jan. 17 confirmation hearing, DeVos suggested that states should be able to decide whether schools must follow the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the 1975 law that guarantees a “free appropriate public education” to disabled students. She later said she may have been confused about IDEA’s requirements.

The hearing prompted Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, to write that he was “was deeply dismayed by her performance” in the hearing. “It was, in a word, disqualifying,” he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post late last month.

In an interview, Pianta on Wednesday said he fears that DeVos could use Congress’ upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act to loosen teacher preparation regulations.

Actually, he said, U.S. colleges of education could use a little innovation in how they train teachers. But “if that doesn’t come with some safeguards … then you just open up the Wild West,” with few regulations on what makes a teacher effective and more “light-touch” training efforts that put teachers into classrooms with very little training.

“We will have a Wild West and we won’t know if we have a Wild West until it’s too late,” he said.

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