| Betsy DeVos ranks as one of the most unpopular members of the Trump cabinet. But she will soon enter her fourth year as Education Secretary, while so many others in the administration have exited ignominiously after clashing with Trump or becoming enmeshed in scandal. HuffPost senior reporter Rebecca Klein covers education policy and politics, and took a long look at how DeVos has managed to stay below the radar, and shape education policy for millions of American students. Must Reads talked to Rebecca about her story and her beat. If I were betting, in early 2017, on the first Trump cabinet official to be fired I definitely would have put money on Betsy DeVos given her disastrous confirmation hearing. How has she managed to stick around so long? That's funny. I think a lot of people felt that way. I've long thought that DeVos would stick around for a long time, based on what I knew about her compared to her fellow cabinet members. There's a few things that separate Betsy from fellow Trump officials who have been given the boot or quit. 1) Trump doesn't really care about education. 2) Betsy genuinely, passionately cares about education. Betsy has all the money one could hope for, and she has never sought out celebrity. It's my understanding that she is doing this job because she really cares about enacting her agenda. Has her relatively low public profile since then helped her enact this harmful agenda -- things like removing protections for students defrauded by for-profit colleges? I think it has. Betsy isn't a self promoter, and she doesn't seek out attention. Compared to other officials, she has had relatively few personal scandals. It's allowed her to quietly move forward with her agenda. You spoke two over a dozen people in DeVos's orbit for this story. Was there any common theme to what they said? I spoke to people who worked with Betsy at the Education Department, worked with her prior to her time in government, people who supported her agenda and people who vehemently opposed her agenda. They all agreed that Betsy cares deeply about her pet cause -- which is school choice -- because she genuinely believes it will help students. What's the craziest education policy story you've covered here at HuffPost? The recent kerfuffle over the Education Department's proposal to cut federal funding for Special Education was pretty crazy. Behind the scenes DeVos had actually worked to try to eliminate the proposal, but she was consistently overruled. In fact, her budget had proposed cutting this funding every year, but it never got attention, and it was never passed. Then, after public uproar over the issue, Trump issued a statement suggesting he had overruled people like Betsy to reinstate a piece of funding that was never actually cut. | 
