evidence: The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most disruptive events in the history of U.S. education. Even now, many students haven't seen the inside of a school building since March. Districts far and wide have been hit with crushing new costs at the same time the pandemic has hammered state education budgets. Aside from distributing the more than $13 billion Congress set aside for K-12 schools in the CARES Act, DeVos has been largely passive on the matter of helping schools further weather the pandemic's financial toll — which dozens of education organizations estimated in May would take at least another $175 billion. [...] The secretary's most forceful pandemic moment came in July when she stood alongside Trump in arguing that schools should reopen in the fall, regardless of their ability to meet CDC safety recommendations. It was a striking pivot for a secretary who had repeatedly cited local control of schools to argue against action at the federal level. At a roundtable with DeVos, Trump threatened that his administration would even "put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools," including saying (erroneously) that he could cut off federal school funds. [...] An earlier version of this story characterized Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as having played a "largely passive role in the early months of the pandemic." The story has been updated to reflect more fully the actions the secretary took in the spring.