Erika Donalds Backs Trump’s Education Plan and AI in Schools

At Turning Point USA’s 2025 AmFest, education reform took center stage and Erika Donalds, a leading school choice advocate and wife of Congressman Byron Donalds, made it clear: the battle to save America starts in the classroom.

Donalds praised President Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education and return power to parents and local communities. “He’s doing exactly what he promised the American people,” she said, emphasizing Trump’s commitment to putting parents not federal bureaucrats in charge of their children’s futures.

Her message was clear: federal control over education has failed. Parents are demanding transparency, accountability, and the ability to choose what’s best for their children and they’re not wrong.

Here’s what Erika Donalds is fighting for:

• School choice across the board: Charter schools, education savings accounts (ESAs), and homeschooling are giving parents more options than ever before. In Donalds’ home state of Florida, ESA dollars are now being used to access individual courses and extracurriculars, not just full-time schooling.

• Dismantling top-down control: Donalds applauded Education Secretary Linda McMahon for executing Trump’s vision, cutting red tape, and returning decision-making power to states and families.

• Civic literacy over woke indoctrination: She warned that students are graduating without understanding the Constitution, the Founders, or the very structure of the nation. That ignorance, she said, puts the republic at risk.

Donalds didn’t shy away from addressing the role of technology in education either. While many conservatives are skeptical of artificial intelligence in classrooms, she offered a fresh perspective one grounded in parental oversight and measurable results.

AI, she argued, isn’t inherently the problem. “We need guardrails and we need parents to have visibility into what’s going on in the AI used in their classrooms,” she said. But with those safeguards in place, AI could be a powerful tool to pinpoint educational gaps, tailor learning for students falling behind, and rescue children slipping through the cracks.

Consider the current state of education in America:

• Only 33% of 8th graders in the U.S. are proficient in reading.

• Math scores have dropped to historic lows nationwide following COVID-era lockdowns pushed by teacher unions and Democrat-run school boards.

• Over 3.7 million students are now homeschooled a record high yet millions more want to be but face structural barriers.

Donalds wants to knock those barriers down and unleash a system where parents not bureaucrats make the final call. Whether that means homeschooling, micro-schooling, charter education, or just ditching the one-size-fits-all curriculum, she’s unapologetic: the public system needs radical change, and the Trump agenda is the way forward.

As the interview wrapped, Donalds left attendees with a powerful reminder: “If our kids don’t understand how our country was built, they won’t know how to defend it.”

That’s the real crisis one that no amount of government spending will fix. Only bold leadership and parental empowerment can turn it around.

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