Betsy DeVos, then U.S. secretary of education, speaks during the"Getting America's Children Safely Back to School" event in the State Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on August 12, 2020On a hot July day in Tampa at the 2022 Moms for Liberty Summit, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told the crowd that the US Department of Education should be abolished.
Since 2021, Yass has spent over $23 million dollars on federal school privatization PACs like the Club for Growth’s School Freedom Fund and the DeVos-backed American Federation for Children’s Victory Fund and Action Fund. In addition to these PACs, Yass has also spent large sums of money directly in states like Pennsylvania, Texas, Kentucky, and others where he spent millions supporting pro-charter candidates and attacking anti-charter candidates, no matter the party.
While the DeVos family has certainly courted sizable donations for the group in the past, Jeff Yass’s massive donations have allowed their PACs to scale up quickly. In 2022,, a 527 political organization run by the Federation. The donation was the largest single donation ever given to the group and quickly made Yass the second largest donor to the group ever behind the DeVos family. In 2023, the Federation started a new PAC called AFC Victory PAC whichgiving $3.5 million out of the total $4.
Not only do these school privatization efforts divert needed funding away from rural public schools, but the taxpayer funded vouchers can be spent on already wealthy private schools and their students. In some of the first states to pass universal school voucher access, like Ohio, Arizona, and Florida, research showed that most of theSchool Freedom Fund Uses Critical Race Theory to Defund Public Schools.
Finally, Yass has spent tens of millions on Pennsylvania elections to win funding for charter and private school vouchers in his home state. The richest man in the state, he spent over $22 million on state elections in the 2022 election cycle andin 2023. Earlier in 2023, Commonwealth Action, a dark money group with ties to Yass, ran ads targeting Democratic state legislators when they chose not to support school vouchers legislation.