This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 26, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How consequential will a school choice advocate be as head of the U.S. Department of Education, and should we actually hope that the

department not actively promote choice?

Should the agency simply get out of the way?

The Cato Institutes Neil McCluskey and Jason Bedrick run through the encouraging news for educational freedom today.

Betsy Devoss is clearly best known for her sort of philanthropic support of school choice.

I mean, she's part of the DeVos family.

You know them, perhaps from Amway.

But what she has done for the vast majority of her time in education has been to support

school choice. Some of it has been directly to schools that she likes. A lot of it has

been to organizations that support school choice.

It's not the case that only school choice has been what

her groups have looked at.

They've looked at standards and accountability and testing

and things like that.

But what really defines her, I think, is the support that she's long had for school choice.

And it's interesting that the media have been creating a narrative about her that is just completely untrue.

I mean in a supposedly straight news article in the New York Times,

the reporter said that she opposed any regulation as too much regulation.

That's a direct quote when it comes to school choice.

Now in some sense I wish that were true, but she is not the Libertarian that she is being portrayed as.

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