School choice advocate Erika Donalds said that students will be better off when parents have better access to what their kids are learning and when schools are held accountable for veering away from what should be taught.
Donalds, the wife of Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL), sat down with The Daily Wire’s Tim Rice and Mary Margaret Olohan for an interview at Turning Point USA’s 2025 AmFest, the first one held without the group’s late founder, Charlie Kirk.
Donalds began by saying that she was excited to see so many people of all ages attending breakout sessions at the conference that were devoted to reforming education — and how fixing what was wrong with education in the United States played into saving the republic as well.
“President Trump is doing exactly what he promised the American people,” Donalds said of President Donald Trump’s plan to first dismantle the Department of Education as a federal entity and then return power to the schools and the states. “He’s going to return that power not just to the states, but expand school choice and give power to the parents to make decisions on behalf of their children.”
Donalds praised Education Secretary Linda McMahon, saying that she had been instrumental in delivering on Trump’s promises.
The conversation turned to charter schools — several of which Donalds has had a hand in founding — and she said that they can serve as valuable school choice options, especially in areas where private schools are too expensive or otherwise inaccessible. She said that even with advances in school choice, she saw a major role for charter schools to partner with Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and to offer more “modular style” classes.
In her home state, Donalds noted, charter schools were already adapting to the changing educational landscape by offering “individual courses and extracurricular activities that families can access using their ESA dollars.”
Responding to a question from Olohan, who noted she was homeschooled for a time herself, Donalds said that the number of families homeschooling in the United States was higher than it had ever been — and that even more families indicated that they’d like to homeschool if they could. Donald made it clear that one of her goals was to help families remove as many of the barriers preventing potential homeschoolers from moving forward as possible.
Rice then raised the issue of artificial intelligence — and how the knee-jerk reaction is often to keep AI out of schools because students will obviously use it to cheat — but Donalds argued that she believed there was certainly room for AI in education.
There should certainly be guard rails in place, Donalds argued, but AI could be used to find gaps in education and help children to succeed who might otherwise fall through the cracks.
“We need guardrails and we need parents to have visibility into what’s going on in the AI used in their classrooms,” she said. “Once those guardrails are in place, I believe AI can absolutely help with the abysmal academic results in this country.”
She went on to explain that AI could help a child struggling with reading by identifying the particular concept that was causing the hang-up and tailoring a curriculum to the child’s needs. The same could be done with other subjects, she said, giving the example of a child having difficulty with algebra and saying that AI could identify where they were going wrong — even if it was a skill they should have picked up in elementary school.
The remainder of the interview focused on ideological and cultural issues seeping into the education system and how expanding parental rights and access to resources and curriculum were the best guard against that.
“We want to make sure that when students are graduating 12th grade that they are civically literate,” Donalds said, arguing that if America’s young people did not understand how the founders had built the country or why the government had been set up the way that it had, they would be unable to defend it in the future.
