Erika Donalds says teachers are the biggest impediment to tech in schools

Erika Donalds, the school choice activist and spouse of Florida’s Republican candidate for governor, says teachers are the biggest blockade to implementing new technologies in classrooms.

Read more Erika Donalds says teachers are the biggest impediment to tech in schools

During a roundtable discussion at the Ronald Reagan Institute Thursday in Washington D.C., Donalds said both ineffective teachers and great teachers can pose problems for the rollout of the technological tools she argues can be more effective than current educational methods.

“If you have a teacher who’s not producing results, their children are not learning, they do not have the reading and math outcomes that are necessary and we have a tool that in a pilot situation is producing better outcomes in reading and math and the teacher says, ‘But I don’t want this tool in my classroom,’ who’s in charge there?” she asked the room.

“Those are the decisions that are having to be made right now: between teachers who unfortunately despite their best efforts are not getting results and the technology that actually is.”

The accountant and former Collier County School Board member founded a charter school management company that started six classical education charter schools in Florida. She also founded a company that develops virtual reality teaching tools called OptimaEd.

Her ownership share in OptimaEd is worth between $500,000 and $1 million, according to the 2025 financial disclosure report filed by her husband, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds. During her comments at the Reagan Institute this week, she also promoted the role of outside vendors like hers in the future of education.

“The question is: Are we going to either allow for or force technology that is likely to produce better outcomes and for which the vendors that are engaging with these tools are accountable to the performance?” she said. “Or are we going to continue to allow them to use the crappy technology that’s not producing results as it is?”

Her comments about educational technology come as Democrats see her financial ties to the charter school industry as a key weakness in Byron Donalds’ gubernatorial campaign.

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About 64% of voters said they had “major doubts” about the Donalds family “profiting from a network of charter schools,” according to a poll conducted by the Democratic Governor’s Association. That group has promoted the poll as evidence of Democrat David Jolly’s viability in the governor’s race — despite Republicans’ massive voter registration advantage in the state.

Byron Donalds, however, has spoken less about educational technology on the campaign trail than his wife. His education platform has centered around promoting individualized learning plans for all students, a redeveloped school grading system and increasing technical education.

Erika Donalds has previously criticized coverage of her positions on accelerating use of artificial intelligence in classrooms, arguing that she wants more oversight of AI in education, not less — albeit through more flexible rulemaking procedures instead of legislation.

But when it comes to implementing technology in classrooms, she says teachers need to get on board, even ones who are producing great results without it.

“The biggest challenge I see with adopting these new technologies, and the desire to ban them, is great teachers who have been teaching the same way for a long time and getting great results, and who have to change their pedagogy if we adopt these technologies — and even when we don’t because students are using it at home,” she said in D.C.

“…That’s probably the biggest barrier, cause they’re the ones writing curricula, they’re the master teachers, they’re the ones providing mentorship and they often can be the blockade,” Donalds said.

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