“We’ve been told that only certified teachers in a traditional classroom environment can deliver instruction. “I see a huge and growing industry of à-la-carte education options-the ability to customize the experience both physically and geographically,” Donalds said. Whereas the former often focusses on the shortcomings of public schools, the latter offers an alternative vision for education: a way of teaching students that calls back to the ancient wisdom and traditions of the Western world, instead of instructing them using progressive pedagogy and frameworks.Įrika Donalds has built an experiment in total parental control over education. (A number of Republicans in Florida have encouraged him to run for governor once DeSantis is out of office.) The movements for school choice and parental rights sometimes dovetail with the classical-school movement, which has been experiencing a revival in America since the nineteen-eighties. She is also married to a congressman, Byron Donalds, a rising star in the Republican Party, who was briefly a contender for Speaker of the House in 2023. She’s well known in Florida political circles: a few of Donalds’s closest activist allies founded the group Moms for Liberty, which has become the leading conservative voice in the movement for parents’ rights in education, and Donalds serves on the group’s advisory board. “It’s a very traditional, back-to-basics education,” Donalds said on a podcast recently.ĭonalds comes from the world of Florida school-choice activism. Teachers talk a lot about virtues, such as courage and self-government. Older ones read the great books and the Constitution. Younger students learn phonics and diagram sentences. OptimaEd bills its education as classical, with an emphasis on the intellectual traditions of Western civilization and the liberal arts. services to students in Arizona-another state that has embraced school choice-and parts of Michigan. But the company is also quickly expanding beyond Florida. This legislation has made it even easier for parents to use state dollars for OptimaEd’s products. Governor Ron DeSantis expanded that program by making all students eligible for education vouchers, funded with the money that would otherwise go toward their public-school education. Ever since Jeb Bush was governor, in the early two-thousands, Florida has provided various kinds of vouchers to students from poor families, and later to those with disabilities, allowing them to purchase courses from companies like OptimaEd. The state was one of the pioneers of the school-choice movement. OptimaEd is possible because of Florida’s distinctive education-policy landscape. (Younger students do something closer to regular virtual school, using Microsoft Teams and Canvas.) In the afternoon, kids complete their coursework independently, with teachers available to answer questions digitally. Starting in third grade, full-time students wear a headset for thirty to forty minutes at a time, for four or five sessions, with built-in pauses so that the students don’t experience visual fatigue. During the past school year, the academy enrolled more than a hundred and seventy full-time students up to eighth grade from all over Florida-a number that OptimaEd will roughly double this fall. The virtual school is part of OptimaEd, a company in Florida founded by Erika Donalds, a forty-three-year-old conservative education activist. In the video, the little girl doesn’t have a single in-person interaction. Her classmates are scattered across different towns, and her teachers live all over the country. She wears the headset on and off for about three hours, removing it to read a book, eat a sandwich, and hot-glue some sort of tinfoil art. The little girl, like most of her classmates and teachers, spends a good part of her day in a Meta Quest 2 headset-a set of one-pound white goggles that extends in a single band across her eyes. This is the vision for a new kind of education sold in a promotional video for Optima Academy Online, an all-virtual school that was launched in 2022. Then everyone puts on spacesuits and helmets, and the class relocates to outer space. In class, she takes notes while her teacher, Mrs. She eats a bowl of cereal and brushes her teeth and hair before going to school.
A little girl, who looks to be about ten years old, hits the button on her alarm clock.
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