For all of their unanswered questions about Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, members of the Senate at least know where a lot of people stand on her.The prospect of Ms. DeVos overseeing the Education Department has inspired both intense opposition and strong support from key players in several educational policy debates. Although most of the controversy surrounding Ms. DeVos, a Michigan billionaire and philanthropist, stems from her role as a leading advocate of public charter schools and school vouchers, some of her statements about higher-education issues such as Title IX enforcement have also been divisive. Her confirmation hearing last week, before members of the Senate education committee, proved rocky, with Democrats on the panel complaining that they did not get enough time to question her.

The committee has postponed its vote on whether to recommend Ms. DeVos’s confirmation — originally scheduled for Tuesday — until January 31 to allow its members time to review her extensive financial disclosures and her plans to avoid conflicts of interest. If no disqualifying information emerges during that review, she is widely expected to win Senate confirmation narrowly and along partisan lines, with that chamber’s slight Republican majority carrying the day. Most past presidents’ picks for the position have won confirmation easily and with little opposition, through voice votes.

Ms. DeVos’s confirmation appears unlikely to silence her critics. Moreover, new controversies may erupt as the Trump administration names other political appointees to Education Department posts with titles such as assistant secretary or under secretary. Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University who advised the department under President Barack Obama, says, “I am much more interested in who are the political appointees in the department other than secretary,” because “those are the people who have to have expertise in the key higher-education policy areas.”

Christopher T. Cross, a former Education Department official who chronicled that agency’s history in the book Political Education, says education secretaries typically have little say over political appointees to other agency posts because “most of those end up being White House-directed.” Mr. Cross, a consultant who in the early 1990s served as assistant secretary for educational research and improvement under President George H.W. Bush, predicted that Mr. Trump’s transition team will seek to have people tied to his campaign placed in top Education Department posts, and top Republican members of Congress will offer up names on their own.

Based on the reaction to Ms. DeVos’s nomination, especially contentious will be the vetting of the Trump administration’s picks for the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights and top posts focused on evaluating and improving elementary and secondary schools.

Following is a breakdown of key players who have weighed in on the nomination of Ms. DeVos.

Supporters

Establishment Republicans. Strongly backing Ms. DeVos’s nomination is Sen. Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Senate education committee, who encouraged the creation of charter schools as education secretary under President George H.W. Bush and has characterized her views on them as mainstream. Senator Alexander, who on Monday denied a request from Democratic committee members to hold a second hearing on Ms. DeVos, is hardly the only big-name Republican to get behind her. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who was the Republican party’s nominee for president in 2012, wrote a Washington Post op-ed saying Ms. DeVos “cares deeply about our children” and dismissing her detractors as having a financial stake in thwarting needed changes at elementary and secondary schools. The former first lady Barbara Bush, who established a foundation to promote literacy, has similarly praised Ms. DeVos as having “a proven record of championing reforms,” as has Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida. Twenty current Republican governors of states or U.S. territories have endorsed her confirmation as someone who “will fight to streamline the federal education bureaucracy, return authority back to states and local school boards, and ensure that more dollars are reaching the classroom.” Among them, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a supporter of school vouchers who has frequently clashed with that state’s public-college professors over their workplace rights, separately wrote the Senate education committee to say her appointment “will help to create an effective education system.” (According to data compiled by the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics, Ms. DeVos has contributed to the campaigns of Mr. Walker and six other state governors who signed the letter. Her family has contributed to the campaigns of Mr. Walker and eight others.)

Critics of Public Schools. Republican senators and governors have been joined in their support for Ms. DeVos by other prominent advocates of change in the financing and governance of public schools. They include Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. In a letter, he told the Senate committee that Ms. DeVos, in her former capacity as head of the American Federation for Children, a pro-school-choice advocacy group, has played a key role in persuading states to adopt policies that help children get needed educational services. Also praising Ms. DeVos: Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy Charter Schools, which operates more than 40 charter schools in New York City, and scholars at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which promotes charter schools. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, which advocates school choice and the provision of federal services to children in nonpublic schools, has weighed in on her behalf.

Joseph Lieberman. Ms. DeVos was glowingly introduced to the Senate education committee by Joseph Lieberman, the former Connecticut senator who was the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president in 2000. Mr. Lieberman, who sits on the American Federation for Children’s board, described Ms. DeVos as a sorely needed “change agent” whose outsider status will be an asset. “She doesn’t come from within the education establishment,” he said. “But honestly, I believe that today that’s one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job.”

Opponents

Teachers Unions. At the forefront in opposing the nomination of Ms. DeVos are the nation’s two major teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, each of which has affiliates that represent college instructors. Both unions had uneasy relations with President Obama as a result of clashes over his administration’s efforts to promote school accountability and make it easier for schools to fire teachers. Their leaders declared support for Hillary Clinton early in the Democratic primaries, based on her statements suggesting she would be more sympathetic. The election of Donald Trump and his nomination of Ms. DeVos, a longtime advocate of charter-school and school-voucher laws that the unions oppose, has dashed such hopes and put them even more on the defensive than they had been before. Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, has faulted Ms. DeVos for lacking any experience as an educator, blamed her for advocacy efforts in Michigan for poorly performing charter schools there, and called her “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee” for education secretary since the position was created by President Jimmy Carter. Lily Eskelsen García, president of the NEA, has described Ms. DeVos as “dangerously unqualified,” faulting her for, among other things, not being a public-school graduate or sending her children to public schools. Helping to organize a recent protest against the appointment of Ms. DeVos: the Professional Staff Congress, which represents education workers at the City University of New York and is affiliated with both the AFT and the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP’s national office, which collaborates with the AFT in organizing unions of college instructors, has not formally discouraged the Senate from confirming Ms. DeVos but last week emailed The Chronicle a statement that called her “part of the economic elite.” It argued that Ms. DeVos “would implement whatever policies the new president wants to put into place which, frankly, could get scary.”

Public-School Officials. Although public-college associations have stayed out of the fray over Ms. DeVos, the major groups representing leaders of public elementary and secondary schools have shown no such reticence. National associations representing elementary school principals, secondary school principals, and school superintendents have joined National PTA, the major teachers unions, and a long list of other associations and advocacy groups in sending the Senate committee a letter that says Ms. DeVos has no record on “many critical issues affecting students and schools” and that what they know about her record is “deeply troubling.”

Other Liberal Advocacy Groups. Leaders of several of the nation’s leading civil-rights organizations have expressed doubts about Ms. DeVos’s qualifications, arguing in a joint statement that, compared to previous education secretaries, her “lack of experience stands out.” Among them, Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, has said, “Nothing that we know about DeVos’s advocacy and background leads us to believe that she’ll hold fast to the department’s civil-rights mission, and everything we do know makes her unfit to lead it.” Susan Henderson, executive director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, said most of the voucher and school-choice programs that Ms. DeVos has advocated have resulted in a “a loss of civil rights for children with disabilities under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.” Two separate advocacy groups, the Center for American Progress and People for the American Way, have been steadily beating drums of opposition. The Education Trust, an advocacy group that promotes high education achievement at all levels of education, has accused Ms. DeVos of showing a willingness to let the Education Department sit back and let state and local decision-makers shortchange students.

Title IX Advocates. The Obama administration’s aggressive enforcement of Title IX, the federal law calling for gender equity in education, led to criticisms that it had pressured colleges to violate the due-process rights of students accused of sexual assault. The Trump administration is widely expected to ease up on such enforcement efforts, but the groups End Rape on Campus and Know Your IX have jointly undertaken a campaign to pressure Ms. DeVos to commit to not doing so. Questioned by the Senate education committee about her plans in this area, Ms. DeVos said a pledge to continue the Obama administration’s efforts “would be premature,” alarming some advocates for women. The American Association of University Women had already told the Senate it had reservations about her based partly on her past donations to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group that has fought some Title IX enforcement efforts as trampling due process. Caught in the crossfire over Ms. DeVos, FIRE has defended its efforts, said it has no position on her nomination, and separately sent President Trump a letter urging him and his administration to scrap the Obama administration’s guidance to colleges on dealing with sexual assault.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at [email protected].