Betsy DeVos-backed group helps fuel expansion of private school funding
The American Federation for Children, founded by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, said it spent $9 million last year to back "school choice" laws.
DES MOINES, Iowa — A conservative nonprofit group founded by former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said it poured about $9 million into state elections last year, backing nearly 200 candidates. Now, some of those candidates are pushing a wave of legislation boosting DeVos’ longtime goal: subsidizing private schools with public dollars.
Using at least $2.5 million from DeVos and her husband, the American Federation for Children has played a pivotal role in getting what supporters call “school choice” policies passed into law in at least three states and introduced in several more, according to current and former GOP legislators, lobbyists for teachers unions and academics.
The nonprofit group has found success amid a 20-year low in approval for the K-12 education system and after two years of protests over lessons involving race and LGBTQ identity. It is now on the verge of ushering in a transformation in how large swaths of the country fund schools.
“They’ve been quite strategic,” Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas, said of the group. “They’ve particularly targeted rural Republicans who are opposed to school choice. They just had to take out a few marginal incumbents, and thereby put the fear of God into the rest of them.”
It’s difficult to determine whether the laws would have been enacted without the American Federation for Children’s involvement; other groups supporting the same “school choice” policies also targeted lawmakers with campaign ads last year. Each state’s political landscape is unique and subject to myriad factors. But the federation’s spending preceded a marked increase in both the scale of private school subsidies on the table at the state level and the rate at which the laws have been enacted.
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