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betsy devos
Governor Mills Stood up for Students and Survivors—Who Will Join Her?
Rather than descend into reactionary advocacy that centers an untrustworthy, increasingly fascist government, we must go above and beyond Title IX, standing up for actionable, lasting solutions to sex-based discrimination in schools.
Mar 27, 2025
“Are you going to comply with that?”
The question came at a bipartisan governors’ meeting, lobbed unceremoniously by U.S. President Donald Trump toward Gov. Janet Mills of Maine. Gov. Mills is one of the few representatives of any political party or institution to defy a recent executive order barring transgender students from women’s sports—and to stand firmly and vocally against the weaponization of Title IX to advance a bigoted, anti-trans agenda.
“I’m complying with the state and federal laws,” she replied. And then—“See you in court.”
Even as we identify and invest in alternate approaches to protecting students from gender-based discrimination, we cannot grant right-wing politicians leeway to weaponize Title IX for their own political gain.
The exchange, though brief, and the rushed and retaliatory federal investigation that followed, echoed far beyond the White House as a rare but critical example of how state, local, and school officials must stand up for students in the absence of adequate federal protections against sex discrimination. And those federal protections have never been adequate.
It is high time to recognize that in practice—and without states and schools moving beyond compliance to true advocacy for their students—Title IX has never offered comprehensive, accessible solutions to gender-based violence. I should know: I’ve experienced Title IX’s failings as a student, an organizer, and a policy advocate working to change how schools treat—and advocate for—survivors.
I was a college student in the Obama years, during what should have been a progressive “golden age” for Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in publicly funded schools. The reality on the ground was marked less by progress than by confusion and chaos. When my peers sought support from our Title IX office, administrators called their reasonable requests for support “too difficult” to address. Without on-campus advocates, nearly 40% of survivors who reported abuse during this period experienced a substantial disruption in their education due to retaliation, institutional betrayal, and being pushed out of schools. Many survivors stayed silent.
When Betsy DeVos gutted Title IX protections during the first Trump administration, I joined the survivor- and youth-led project Know Your IX, where I worked with student activists whose horror stories under the Trump administration’s Title IX rule sounded eerily familiar. Survivors experiencing traumatic investigations dropped out of school—paying off student loans for a degree they would never get. Medical school students chose not to report abuse for fear of losing professional opportunities. Young people who had experienced dating abuse developed new mental health challenges, and their schools refused to grant accommodations. And though Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, Trump-era guidance on how schools should enforce Title IX persisted throughout nearly the entirety of his presidency. President Trump moved to officially reinstate DeVos-era guidance, after appointing people who have caused sexual harm or been complicit in it (including Secretary of Education Linda McMahon) to the highest positions of power in our country. If it wasn’t already clear, it should be staggeringly so now: We cannot rely on the federal government to save us.
Rather than descend into reactionary advocacy that centers an untrustworthy, increasingly fascist government, we must go above and beyond Title IX, standing up for actionable, lasting solutions to sex-based discrimination in schools. Local organizing at K-12 schools and college campuses led by students and survivors offers one path forward. We can also fight for stronger state anti-discrimination policies that reflect the needs of marginalized students. And we can empower student groups with resources and training to support their peers in the absence of federal or administrative protections.
Most importantly, it is time for schools to take responsibility for protecting their students and act accordingly—regardless of state and federal policy, or how the president decides to interpret the 37 words that make up the statute of Title IX. While federally funded schools are required to comply with Trump’s Title IX rule, they can and should create separate anti-discrimination policies that fill in the gaps of the current Title IX rule. We should encourage schools to go above and beyond what federal law requires to protect students from sexual violence, and respond with care when it occurs.
Of course, in the absence of strong, federal legislation codifying students’ protections and schools’ responsibility to address gender-based discrimination, “sending education back to the states” creates an inequitable patchwork of civil rights protections, resulting in even more students experiencing traumatic disruptions to their education. While investing in school- and state-level organizing, we must build wide networks of support and mutual aid that persist no matter how hostile the environment. Groups like Know Your IX, now a project of the national youth activism organization Advocates for Youth, will continue to organize alongside brilliant and dedicated survivors and student activists holding their schools accountable and fighting for survivor-centered solutions.
Even as we identify and invest in alternate approaches to protecting students from gender-based discrimination, we cannot grant right-wing politicians leeway to weaponize Title IX for their own political gain. We must join Gov. Mills and shout from the rooftops that bigoted, transphobic attempts to attack marginalized young people through education policy will never be a solution to this country’s epidemic of sexual harassment and assault. We must hold strong in the face of increasingly brazen attempts from federal officials to curb students’ rights and retaliate against dissidence. If lawmakers actually cared about women and girls, they would bolster Title IX protections—not attempt to dismantle them.
Title IX was always the floor, not the ceiling. Now, it’s time to aim for the stars. Student survivors, LGBTQI+ youth, and pregnant and parenting people deserve nothing less.
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Sanders Report Details Plot by Right-Wing Billionaires to 'Sabotage' Public Education
"Instead of siphoning money and increasing tax breaks to subsidize private education, we have a responsibility to ensure all students have access to quality K-12 education."
Jun 25, 2024
Sen. Bernie Sanders released a report Tuesday detailing how right-wing billionaires are bankrolling coordinated efforts to privatize U.S. public education by promoting voucher programs that siphon critical funding away from already-underresourced public schools.
The report notes that last year, the American Federation for Children (AFC)—an organization funded by former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—"ousted state lawmakers in Iowa and Arkansas who resisted proposals to subsidize private education in states and passed expansive private school vouchers."
Aided by millions of dollars in funding from DeVos and her husband, "AFC's political affiliates and allies spent $9 million to win 277 out of 368 races to remove at least 40 incumbent lawmakers," the report adds.
The DeVos family is hardly alone in using its wealth to undercut U.S. public education. The Bradley Foundation, which has been knee-deep in efforts to privatize education in Wisconsin and across the country, spent $7.5 million in 2022 "to fund 34 state affiliates of the State Policy Network to push conservative policy agendas, including privatizing education, and $8.3 million to building a youth movement to 'win the American Culture War.'"
"The Koch-sponsored group, American Encore, has funneled substantial amounts into state governor races and ballot initiatives around the country, including more than $1.4 million to elect Arizona's former governor Doug Ducey in 2014 (who led the efforts to create the nation's first universal private school voucher)," the report adds.
"For too long, there's been a coordinated effort to sabotage our public schools and privatize our education system. Unacceptable."
The analysis also names billionaires Jess Yass of Susquehanna International Group, Richard Uihlein of Uline, and Bernard Marcus of Home Depot, all of whom have recently donated to the School Freedom Fund—a PAC that supports voucher programs and shuttering the U.S. Education Department.
School voucher programs
disproportionately benefit wealthy families, analyses have shown, while undercutting the goal of serving all students within a community.
"Over the past decade, there has been a coordinated effort on the part of right-wing billionaires to undermine, dismantle, and sabotage our nation's public schools and to privatize our education system," Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, said in a statement. " That is absolutely unacceptable."
"We can no longer tolerate billionaires and multinational corporations receiving massive tax breaks and subsidies while children in America are forced to go to understaffed, underresourced, and underfunded public schools," Sanders continued. "On this 70th anniversary year of Brown v. Board of Education, let us recommit to creating an education system that works for all of our people, not just the wealthy few."
The new report, authored by the Senate HELP Committee's majority staff, comes days after Sanders presided over a hearing at which a pair of public school teachers decried the low educator pay and lack of resources plaguing schools across the U.S. and threatening the foundations of the country's public education system.
The committee's report shows that while most states have chronically underfunded their public schools, spending on voucher programs that subsidize private schools with taxpayer dollars has surged across the country. Between 2008 and 2019, according to a recent analysis cited in the report, Florida ramped up spending on voucher programs by 313% while "decreasing per-pupil funding of public schooling by 12%."
"The expansion of private school voucher programs forces very real tradeoffs. Money spent on private school vouchers could instead be used to hire teachers, raise wages, hire school counselors, and invest in high-quality academics for students," reads the new report, which estimates that "Arizona could hire 15,730 more public K-12 teachers with the money it is instead spending on private school vouchers."
The report calls on Congress to help reverse the trend of billionaire-backed school privatization by investing more in public education—including early childhood education and community schools—and by passing Sanders' legislation to set the pay floor for U.S. public school teachers at $60,000 a year.
The report also recommends passage of the
College for All Act, a Sanders-led bill that would make public colleges and universities tuition-free for students from households making less than $250,000 a year.
"As the richest country in history, the United States should have the best education system in the world," Sanders' report reads. "Our public education system is not perfect—it is underfunded and racially and socioeconomically segregated. Our educators are not respected or paid nearly what they deserve."
"Massive tax breaks to the wealthiest people and largest corporations are being prioritized over opportunities to progressively raise revenue to support social services and public education," the report continues. "Instead of siphoning money and increasing tax breaks to subsidize private education, we have a responsibility to ensure all students have access to quality K-12 education. This requires adequate and equitable funding and addressing structural challenges in our public schools."
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Conservative Philanthropy's Plan for a Corporate Coup
What if every federal department was run by Betsy DeVos?
Apr 25, 2024
Imagine it’s Monday, January 20, 2025, and by the end of the day, somewhere between 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of the 2 million federal government employees are summarily out of a job. A skeleton crew made up of a list of far-right, free-market conservatives excited to carry out an unpopular anti-democratic agenda has replaced them. Their marching orders are to cater to big business and rot every institution established to protect our lives, from education to transportation, from housing to labor to environmental protections to healthcare and more.
This is not a far-fetched dystopian nightmare.
It’s a plan outlined in a more than 800-page document from the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership.
The Heritage Foundation is compiling and vetting a list of thousands of extremist operatives like DeVos who have little to no experience running programs for the American people, but are eager to wreak similar havoc across our entire government
This supposed “Mandate for Leadership” was drafted in collaboration with more than 50 organizations and 360 so-called “experts” from the conservative movement to promote policies based on free enterprise and limited government. If implemented, the plan would gut the governmental agencies that should be working for the people and replace anyone left standing with corporate shills.
What’s In Store If Heritage DeVos-ifies America
What would the unraveling of these democratic cornerstones look like? Imagine if every department in the U.S. was run by a Betsy DeVos. As a reminder, former President Donald Trump appointed DeVos as the secretary of education despite her having no experience with public education as a student, teacher, or leader. Her sole qualification was loyalty to a free-market agenda and a vision to privatize public schools.
Among the disastrous policies she advanced, DeVos:
- Proposed a $7B cut to public education with a significant portion of that defunding aid for students with disabilities;
- Advocated for a voucher program to siphon money out of public schools into private hands; and
- Proposed increasing guns in schools by using funding intended for student enrichment to purchase weapons for teachers.
The Heritage Foundation is compiling and vetting a list of thousands of extremist operatives like DeVos who have little to no experience running programs for the American people, but are eager to wreak similar havoc across our entire government from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice and more.
Anti-Democratic Philanthropy
Philanthropy isn’t neutral. Organizations like Heritage exemplify how the philanthropic sector is weaponized to rig systems in favor of their donors' quest for political and economic power. Heritage donors receive huge tax breaks on the millions of dollars they give to fund this work. Not only do the American people lose out on those tax dollars that should be funding our schools—among other things—but Heritage is more than happy to conceal those donor identities. I couldn't find their donors online and they don't seem to be in their 990s. Their donors may not want to be publically linked to this anti-democratic plan, but Project 2025 is their path to roll back the remaining safeguards protecting our communities from corporate greed. If they have their way, we can thank the Heritage Foundation’s nameless donors for more toxins in our water, fewer teachers in our schools, and fewer protections for workers.
Public Harms vs. Public Goods
Conservative initiatives like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are the antithesis of the vision the Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) and our grant partners have for the future. In response to their authoritarian agenda, nonprofits and donors alike should collectively double down to use our resources to resist pressure from those groups that are clearly at odds with the work needed to build a just society.
At MCF, we use our endowment to advance a vision of a government that digs deeper to serve everyday people and prioritizes safeguarding the natural resources, educational institutions, and infrastructure we rely on to live lives of dignity, health, and well-being.
Instead of slashing government jobs or “slitting throats” on day one as one of our government officials so plainly phrased it, the future we’re fighting for is one where well-paid, dignified public jobs help people economically obtain what they need and deserve to live good lives. We know that advancing the unfinished business of racial and economic justice is generations in the making. We’re committed to funding the grassroots organizations building community power to make it possible.
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