Edit: Further, the only connection I can find between these two is support before her confirmation [0][1], based on the grounds that she is for school choice. Which is no surprise he agrees with considering the learnings of the book.
[0] https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2017/02/04/educ...
[1] https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/02/17/education-...
I've heard very little about her actual actions or policies beyond revoking the "Dear Colleague" letter.
Before joining the Trump administration, [DeVos]...had a strong hand in the spread of for-profit charter schools in her home state of Michigan, which saw a dramatic drop in average school performances after her pet policies were enacted. As secretary of education, she's consistently sidelined student civil rights and worked to make debt relief harder than ever.
https://www.gq.com/story/betsy-devos-is-the-worst
Even Trump overruled her on plans to gut the Special Olympics
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/betsy-devos-...
in response to a question about whether guns belonged in schools, she referred to a school in Wyoming and said, “I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”
DeVos was confirmed by the Senate — but only, for the first time in U.S. history, after a vice president had to vote to break a tie.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/10/25/betsy-de...
It seemed very unlikely that out of roughly 150 million eligible Americans, the very best choice was someone who had zero experience with the public school system.
After she began her work, the thing that I particularly disliked was her support of Indiana charter schools to both receive federal taxpayer funding while at the same time being allowed to ban a student for being gay (or their parents being gay).
As a simple example: in 2017, DeVos and Trump proposed "cutting $1.2 billion for after-school programs that serve 1.6 million children, most of whom are poor, and $2.1 billion for teacher training and class-size reduction" [1]. These cuts also affected efforts such as mentoring, recruitment, and retention [2].
In 2018, she proposed regulations that "require full hearings, cross examination of sexual assault victims, and raise the standard of evidence to hold a student accused of sexual assault accountable" [3], which experts have said "would allow schools and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to ignore much of the sexual harassment that occurs in schools" [3].
I don't even know how to summarize this whole mess, so I'm just going to use the subtitle of the article: "The administration wants to keep schools safe by ditching rules meant to prevent racial bias in school discipline" [4].
More recently, she "illegally delayed an Obama-era rule that required states to address racial disparities in special education programs" [5].
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trumps-first-... [2]: http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/Funding-the-Wall-vs-ESEA-Titl... [3]: https://www.thedp.com/article/2018/11/betsy-devos-education-... [4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/12/trumps... [5]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/us/politics/betsy-devos-s...