Betsy DeVos: The Investor Who Got a High Return.

• Author: Nichols, John

In March 2017, the eleventh Secretary of Education for a nation founded on James Madison's premise that "learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people" because "they throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty" embraced a federal budget proposal to cut $9 billion from programs that support public education.

Yes, public schools would suffer. But Betsy DeVos was delighted that the Trump Administration's budget blueprint called for steering $1.4 billion toward the gimmicky "school choice" programs that she had championed for decades as an alternative to public education. These are programs that education historian Diane Ravitch, who served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education during George H.W. Bush's presidency, has decried as a "hoax" that destroys communities and public schools.

DeVos had gotten what she paid for. Twenty years before she joined Donald Trump's wrecking crew Cabinet, DeVos had explained that, as a billionaire campaign contributor to conservative causes, she was on a mission.

"I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party. Occasionally a wayward reporter will try to make the charge that we are giving this money to get something in return, or that we must be purchasing influence in some way," she wrote in an essay for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. After explaining that she did not always get everything that she demanded, DeVos continued, "I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return."

"We expect a return on our investment," wrote DeVos, an heir to a manufacturing fortune (and the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, the private military services contractor) who married into the Amway fortune. She described that "return" as Republican Party election wins and the advancement of "a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues."

Over the next two decades, DeVos used her money to make the Republican Party an ever more outlandish critic of public education and an ever more unapologetic advocate for steering public money into discredited choice, charter, and privatization schemes.

A special-interest power player who travels in the...