InformED Report: DeVos Confirmation Controversy
The edition follows Betsy DeVos's contested confirmation and the travel ban's effect on international students, including one college's scholarship response.
Betsy DeVos was confirmed after a bitter fight, while the travel ban touched 17,000 students and a Massachusetts college answered with a scholarship.
Two decisions from the first weeks of the Trump administration dominated education news in early February 2017: Betsy DeVos’s nomination as Secretary of Education, and the executive order barring travel from seven majority-Muslim countries. The InformED Report for February 14, 2017 followed both, along with a Massachusetts college’s response to the ban. The spotlight went to a new system in British primary schools for tracking how active children are each day.
In this edition
- The Senate education committee approved Betsy DeVos 12-11 on party lines, hours after The Washington Post reported passages in her written answers that matched other sources without attribution.
- More than 17,000 students from the seven countries named in President Trump’s immigration order had studied in the U.S. the previous year, many of them in STEM fields.
- Wheaton College in Massachusetts planned a full scholarship for a refugee student, with preference for students from the seven countries.
- A new Healthy Active Schools System launched in the U.K. to give primary schools daily reports on each child’s physical activity.
The DeVos confirmation fight
On January 31, 2017, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved DeVos by a 12-11 vote along party lines, sending her nomination to the full Senate, The Times-Picayune’s Danielle Dreilinger reported. Reaction was intense on both sides: the day before the vote, the paper received one email announcing that more than 1,450,000 people had petitioned the Senate to block her, and another saying support for her continued to grow.
The same morning as the committee vote, The Washington Post reported that some of DeVos’s written answers to Senator Patty Murray, the committee’s ranking Democrat, contained sentences and phrases taken from other sources without attribution, as the Daily Mail’s Nikki Schwab summarized. In one example, DeVos’s answer on bullying of LGBT students closely matched a 2016 statement by Vanita Gupta, who led the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Obama. The report did not change the committee’s vote.
By the time this edition ran, the outcome was settled. The full Senate confirmed DeVos on February 7, 2017, by 51 votes to 50, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote. For school and district leaders, the confirmation fight was a measure of how divided the country was over school choice, and a sign that federal policy on vouchers and charters would stay contested.
The travel ban and international students
President Trump’s executive order, issued on January 27, 2017, barred citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. In The 74, Mark Keierleber reported that international students and researchers were among those caught by it, with dozens prevented from boarding flights to the U.S. or sent back after landing. More than 17,000 students from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen had studied in the U.S. the previous school year, more than 12,000 of them from Iran. More than three quarters of the Iranian students were in STEM fields, and companies including Apple, Google and Facebook warned that the ban threatened their future workforce.
The order’s future was uncertain as this edition went out. A federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked it on February 3, and on February 9 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reinstate it. For colleges and high schools with international students, it raised practical questions about travel, visas and support for affected families.
Wheaton College’s refugee scholarship
Wheaton College in Massachusetts responded by creating a full scholarship for a refugee escaping conflict, with preference for students from the seven countries named in the order, U.S. News’s Lauren Camera reported. President Dennis Hanno said the college was establishing the Wheaton Refugee Scholarship “as a way of adding our voice to the chorus of people across the country who are calling for the immigration ban to be lifted.” He also described the college as “a global institution that is dedicated to improving the world by advancing knowledge and sharing it.” One scholarship is small set against thousands of affected students, but it was a clear statement.
InformED Report spotlight: tracking activity in British primary schools
In the U.K., a new system for monitoring pupils’ physical activity through the school day launched on January 31, 2017, The Telegraph’s Harry Yorke reported. The Healthy Active Schools System, devised by the children’s activity provider Fit For Sport, gives schools daily reports on each child’s activity and breaks the results down by class and year group so teachers can see where improvement is needed. It was open to all primary schools through their sports premium funding.
The launch came a week after the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health reported that 40 percent of children in the most deprived areas were overweight or obese in 2016, against 27 percent in more affluent areas. The government’s Childhood Obesity Strategy called on primary schools to provide 30 minutes of physical activity every day, and the new system was designed to help schools show they were meeting that goal. Measuring activity is a first step rather than a solution, but as one advocate in the article argued, schools cannot judge what works without reliable data.
Further reading from that week
- MLive: What to expect now that Betsy DeVos is U.S. education secretary
- The New York Times: Betsy DeVos, Pick for Secretary of Education, Is the Most Jeered
- The Washington Post: Universities tell judge travel ban hurts schools, students
- edCircuit: International Students Going Incognito
Sources
- Danielle Dreilinger, “Betsy DeVos clears one confirmation hurdle: 6 takeaways,” The Times-Picayune, January 31, 2017.
- Nikki Schwab, “Trump’s pick for education is accused of plagiarizing answers to questionnaire for her confirmation hearing,” The Daily Mail, January 31, 2017.
- Mark Keierleber, “What Trump’s Ban Means for 17,000 Students From 7 Nations and the Future of the U.S. Tech Industry,” The 74, January 31, 2017.
- Lauren Camera, “School Offers ‘Refugee Scholarship’ in Protest of Trump Order,” U.S. News & World Report, January 2017.
- Harry Yorke, “National school exercise scheme launched in bid to tackle childhood obesity,” The Telegraph, January 31, 2017.
About the InformED Report
The InformED Report is edCircuit’s short news program on education. This edition first ran on February 14, 2017. In 2026, edCircuit re-presented it with a new anchor and this full written account. Both report the stories as they stood on that date and link the original reporting, so readers can see exactly where each claim came from.
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