Erika Donalds: escaping the education bureaucracy trap
Erika Donalds is the chair of the America First Policy Institute’s Center for Education Opportunity and a national expert on education policy and school choice. She is a forceful advocate for high-quality school choice options and improved school accountability. Erika is a former member of the Collier County School Board and has served on Florida’s 2017-2018 Constitution Revision Commission and Governor Ron DeSantis’ Advisory Committee on Education and Workforce Development. Erika and her husband, Byron, live in Naples with their three sons. She recently spoke with American Habits editor Ray Nothstine.
Given your time on the Collier County School Board in Florida, what challenges did you see in maintaining local control over education? Did federal or state mandates create obstacles to serving students effectively?
Erika Donalds: Absolutely. I was on the board from 2014 to 2018. I joke now because I’m involved with helping to dismantle the Department of Education, but even back then, I suggested that we stop taking federal money and eliminate all the extra work that we were doing to comply with federal mandates. I believed we would be better off since we were spending so much time and money on compliance as a school board.
The truth is some teachers spend more time completing paperwork for special needs students. That’s backwards. I didn’t see the issue as a lack of willingness to help these students—it’s the excessive compliance requirements that take time away from real support in the classroom.
Of course, the media and teachers’ unions didn’t receive it well, but it sparked important conversations about education. When the federal government involves itself in areas where it doesn’t belong, it burdens those working on the ground. At that point, you have to ask: is the funding they’re dangling in front of you even worth the cost?
Starting in the Obama administration there was disciplinary guidance to local schools from the Office of Civil Rights essentially stating that they needed to create more parity or fairness in suspensions based on race. I just read a good op-ed on the cost of compliance for that mandate. The guidance or mandate hinted at there being systemic racism in schools. How did these policies affect local schools, and do you think they undermined the ability of local educators to maintain discipline in classrooms and was this an issue in Florida?
Donalds: No, there isn’t, and the cost of that mandate from the federal government was more than dollars. The directive from the Obama administration, the Dear Colleague letter of 2014, led to lax discipline policies in Florida and across the country. If you recall, the letter stated that even if a disciplinary policy wasn’t inherently discriminatory, if there were disparate outcomes, school districts were encouraged to fix those disparities.
Unfortunately, it led to lax discipline policies across the board and the now-infamous PROMISE Program in Broward County, Florida. This program allowed Nikolas Cruz, the perpetrator of the Parkland massacre on February 14, 2018, to avoid the disciplinary record he deserved for his prior infractions. As a result, he was able to purchase a firearm and carry out that horrific attack on innocent students.
That’s a perfect example. The issue isn’t just the dollar cost—it’s federal officials pushing ideology onto local schools, forcing them to adjust based on Washington’s agenda. In this case, those ideological decisions cost lives.
Looking ahead, what reforms or policies do you believe are most needed to strengthen state and local control over education while ensuring students receive the best possible outcomes?
Donalds: I’m a big believer in the free market, and I think the free market can do what government can’t. No matter how much regulation we’ve put in place, no matter how much funding, because there are some areas of our country that have astronomical funding, frankly, for education, no matter what kind of standardized tests that we’ve put in our grading systems, it hasn’t worked. Even in one of the most accountable systems in the country—like Florida—only about half, and often fewer, of our students are proficient in reading and math. That’s unacceptable.
Even with free market principles and universal school choice, that alone isn’t enough—it doesn’t fully capture what I believe is necessary. In a true free market education system, where parents act as consumers and every education dollar is parent-directed, we would see the innovation, quality, and access that families need and deserve. This approach is essential to improving student performance on a broad scale.
The free market environment allows for more information and accountability through transparency. It’s not unlike having Yelp for food. We don’t need the government to tell us what food is good. We go on Yelp, and it has pictures and reviews. It has all the information that we need.
When parents start looking for that information because they’re the ones making the choices with the money that they are directing, you’re going to have those same types of innovations come about and schools will start to compete on the information that they’re providing to parents, whether that means scores, the quality of their teachers, the tenure, the safety, all of that’s going to start to be available so that parents not only have a plethora of free market options, but they also have the information they need to make informed decisions.
Most conservatives and limited government advocates say that education is a state and local matter. The word “education” isn’t in the U.S. Constitution, and we have a Tenth Amendment that is clear. What’s your response to those who say a strong federal role is necessary to ensure quality and equity in education? They say we need guardrails, oversight, and more fairness.
Donalds: How’s that going is the best answer. The federal Department of Education has existed for over 40 years and our scores have not improved. Schools are not more accountable than they were previously. In fact, you could argue that they’re less accountable because they can blame the federal government. Who’s going to hold the federal Department of Education accountable? Not even the president or Congress can do that because they’re part of this bureaucratic deep state in Washington.
This is why Secretary Linda McMahon and President Trump have promised to return it to the states. Does that mean that some states will behave badly with this additional funding that they’re going to get with no strings attached? Certainly. In some cases, they’ll be controlled by teachers’ unions that will funnel more money into state bureaucracies. However, voters in those states can hold their leaders accountable. With federal funds, those officials are the ones making the decisions—unlike the current system, where responsibility is scattered, and there’s plenty of finger-pointing but very little accountability.
While I agree that some accountability may be needed in the Office for Civil Rights—which we believe should remain within the Department of Justice—federal oversight of academic performance has failed entirely. In fact, it may have had the opposite effect, as we discussed earlier, with teachers spending more time on compliance than serving students.
We are seeing a lot of states implement reforms now. Faster than ever, at least. Do you think we will see improvements in outcomes with more school choice or does that even need to be one of the main goals of the movement? Why is school choice superior?
Donalds: I think free market competition increases quality across the board. Doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, as well as the opposite being true. When you have a monopoly, which is what we have in education right now for all intents and purposes, quality is diminished and there is no incentive for quality outcomes. Just that premise by itself, I believe, shows us that with increased competition, the quality of the outcomes improves.
We’ve also seen empirical evidence as proof. If you look at a state like Florida that puts out reports of their charter school performance, over the last 25 years, these schools of choice have outperformed their public-school counterparts on every demographic and every grade level, nearly every single year that they have existed, and especially when it comes to some of the more disadvantaged populations.
No matter what level you’re talking about, that increased choice does help the performance. Also, there are studies across the nation, the majority of which show that when choice exists, the public schools also improve their performance when choice exists around those public schools. Not only do we know that free markets work, but also the evidence suggests in almost every case that school choice will increase the quality of outcomes, both for the choice students and for the students that remain in public schools.
I want to get some free advice. I have three boys like you. They’re younger, two, six, and eight. Some days are crazy. What advice can you give the moms and dads about raising boys and helping to cultivate a love and learning in them and moral formation?
Donalds: My boys were very fortunate for me to have found classical education very early on in their development. They love classical education because of the stories and the history. One son loves the Crusades and learning about that period. Another one is obsessed with World War II. They love poetry. They love reading classic literature and I believe that classical education is great for young boys. More importantly, you need to put them in a school that doesn’t treat them like defective girls.
I find that in many schools, the girls are the gold standard, and boys are treated if they don’t behave like girls, which they don’t, as we all know, especially at very young ages, it’s demoralizing for them. Schools and teachers need to understand the differences between young girls and young boys. Boys should be encouraged to express themselves as they are, without being criticized for behaviors that are part of their nature, like exhibiting the traits of conquerors, warriors, or hunters.
…you need to put boys in a school that doesn’t treat them like defective girls.
It’s important that our teachers and our schools understand the differences in these young children and that they play to their strengths with the curriculum and the pedagogy and understand how to deal with different types of students.
I love individual-gender schools. They’re very rare these days. I hope that the free market brings more boys’ schools and girls’ schools back into existence. I just visited one Jewish day school in Miami that was split between boys and girls. It’s a wonderful —if you can find it. Boys need to be able to be boys to flourish in how they were created.
My dad was an Air Force pilot, so I lived all over the world. I lived in Hawaii where there are great beaches. But Florida has really good ones, too. I want to know, are the beaches better on the Atlantic or the Gulf side?
Donalds: I am a Gulf side girl here on the Gulf of America. I grew up in Tampa and I’ve lived in Naples for the past 20 years. We do love the Gulf waters. They’re nice, warm, and calm. You don’t get exhausted battling the waves. Of course, the number one reason the Gulf side is better is the sunsets. We get to watch the sunset over the beautiful water, and there’s truly nothing like it—it never gets old. When you go to the beach here in Naples, “Florida’s Paradise Coast,” to watch the sunset, literally everyone on the beach claps. It’s a whole thing, and it’s amazing. I feel incredibly fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
