• Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos believes Republicans need to focus on five points of reform for the American education system, with the most important being educational freedom.
• “The last two years, children have been held hostage to this cause or these multiple causes and a system that too many of them cannot escape,” DeVos told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
• DeVos believes there is still a pathway for Republicans to eliminate the Department of Education and they should take it.

The Biden administration’s damage to public education can be undone by Republicans with a few important reforms, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

DeVos has a five-point plan to reform education that Republicans should campaign on now and implement when they retake Congress, she told the DCNF. The five points include education freedom, eliminating the Department of Education (DOE), supporting multiple pathways to post-K-12 education, federal student aid reform and restoring Title IX.

DeVos told the DCNF that educational freedom, or the ability of parents to send their children to a wider array of schools, is the most important reform. A free education environment will allow students to receive funds to transfer from public schools to different education options such as charter schools, private schools and homeschooling, DeVos explained.

“The last two years, children have been held hostage to this cause or these multiple causes and a system that too many of them cannot escape,” DeVos told the DCNF. “The solution to that is to have policies that will actually allow the resources to follow the family, to follow the child, to wherever their family decides they’re going to learn best.”

While the Trump administration failed to significantly shrink the DOE, DeVos believes it is still possible and necessary for Republicans to do, she told the DCNF.

“Shrink or do away with the Department of Education. I think that Republicans have talked about it for many, many years, but I think it actually would be feasible to do, practically speaking, by blocking grants to the states, which is what we proposed, in the last two years of our budget and presented to Congress to debate. There was some interest among Republicans but not enough to get a lot of airspeed,” DeVos told the DCNF. “Just watching how the system has performed or not performed the last two years, I think makes this argument of shrinking the department to be much more potent.”

As college enrollment is down nationwide, DeVos believes apprenticeship programs need to be expanded because it benefits young people to learn through experience, she said to the DCNF.

“We need to be supporting multiple pathways post-K-12 years, including expanding apprenticeship opportunities. The Trump administration established an industry that recognized apprenticeship programs, which then the Biden administration immediately did away with because it didn’t require participants to be union members,” DeVos told the DCNF.

Reversing Biden’s Title IX changes is another important issue for DeVos because of the way Biden’s plans will fundamentally change women’s sports, she told the DCNF. The Biden administration’s proposed extension of Title IX could make public schools let biological men participate in women’s sports and share the same locker rooms as the female athletes.

DeVos elaborates on her plan to save the American education system, as well her time in the Trump administration, in her book “Hostages No More,” which was released on June 21.

“The American creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurship is going to more than rise to the occasion when families are empowered with those resources to make those decisions and choices for their kids,” DeVos told the DCNF.