Erika Donalds wants more AI in Florida classrooms and fewer laws slowing it down

Education admin September 2, 2026 0 Comments

Erika Donalds wants more AI in Florida classrooms and fewer laws slowing it down

Erika Donalds, a charter school executive heavily involved in education policy whose husband, Byron Donalds, is the GOP nominee for governor, said Wednesday she thinks artificial intelligence can help Florida students and teachers thrive.

In many cases, she added, AI will “be the best teacher” available to students.

Donalds, speaking at an event focused on AI in Miami hosted by news outlet Axios Miami and sponsored by AI frontier lab Anthropic, said that she thinks rulemaking around the technology should be limited.

Her comments on the topic welded AI onto the broader philosophy of school choice. Donalds, who is among the nation’s most vocal advocates for school choice initiatives like charter schools and offering tax dollars for private schooling, framed AI as another choice that should be protected.

“I think guardrails are incredibly important in this space, but it has to be balanced. What I mean by that is that the state has a responsibility to protect children from harm, not protect children from parental decisions and preferences,” Donalds said.

When it comes to AI, that means being open rulemaking by the local and state school board, but pumping the brakes on new state laws limiting the technology, she said. Limiting students from becoming socially or emotionally reliant on AI, or other obvious harms to children, was one example of a rule that might be helpful, she said.

READ MORE: A pro-AI group spent $500K on ads for Byron Donalds using controversial media firm

But she warned against “overzealousness of government” in regulating AI.

“We hear about the kids who talked to ChatGPT and went and shot up FSU, or talked to the chatbot and killed themselves – (those) are horrible, horrible situations, but we cannot legislate to those situations and say we’re going to prevent that from happening, therefore we prevent all of these good things as well,” Donalds said.

AI capabilities, and the corresponding infrastructure to support it, have grown rapidly in recent years. Its applications in education – whether that’s been district-sanctioned or students using it covertly to finish homework – have also grown.

Recently, an AI-powered private school devoid of traditional teachers opened in Miami Beach. Miami-Dade County Public Schools has an agreement with Google to access Gemini, its proprietary large language model.

Donalds, who has established charter school nonprofits as well as for-profit management companies, spoke of incorporating AI-powered avatars of historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and Rosa Parks in her own virtual school, Optima Academy Online.

The trend has stoked both hopes and fears around AI’s educational uses. Florida policymakers have proposed limitations on young people’s access to AI.

Donalds and other panelists – including former Florida governor Jeb Bush, City of Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo and Cesar Fernandez, Anthropic’s head of US state and local government relations – were mostly hopeful.

In her interview with Axios Miami’s Sommer Brugal, Donalds said that nothing can replace the human connection and spark that a teacher can instill in their students. But Donalds’ comment on AI being the “best teacher” for many students in Florida was informed by her evaluation of teachers as a whole.

“In this country, half or more of our students do not have access to a highly qualified teacher… (AI) will allow kids in places that don’t have access to good teaching access to something that is not going to be the same as a great human teacher, but it’s going to be the best teacher that they have available to them, and unfortunately, that’s just the reality in the United States of America,” Donalds said.

For good teachers, she said, AI can help them limit busywork and expand their overall capabilities, while allowing them to focus on the irreplaceable human element of education they provide.

Donalds didn’t say that she, or parents, supported replacing teachers with AI.

“I don’t see a lot of parents that want to remove teachers from classroom settings… AI can do a lot of things and expand the capabilities of a teacher, but not replace them,” Donalds said.

The other panelists struck a similar tone when it came to the applications of AI in education.

Bush, a pioneer in the school choice movement during his time leading the state, said he was a big fan of Donalds’ work.

Byron Donalds is running against Democratic candidate David Jolly, a former GOP U.S. representative, for the governor’s mansion in this year’s November election. He and his wife have proposed an overhaul of the state’s grading system for schools and intend to more fully embrace private enterprise in Florida’s system of K-12 education.

Bush asserted AI is “going to be around” and needed to be embraced rather than avoided. He encouraged its development within U.S. borders and its use in the classroom — not as a replacement for one’s own thinking, but as a prompt to think differently.

For teachers, he imagined it could lighten the load.

“AI could provide a customized lesson plan the next day for every teacher. Like, that is a dream come true. That turns teaching away from being a drudgery to something where you can see in the eyes of children the soaring nature of learning,” Bush said.