is 6 yes A little girl who looked about ten years old pressed the button of the alarm clock. Before school, she eats a bowl of cereal, brushes her teeth and combs her hair. In class, she took notes while listening to her teacher, Mrs. Marty. Then everyone dons their spacesuits and helmets and the class transfers to outer space.
That’s the vision for a new kind of education outlined in a promotional video for Optima Academy Online, an all-virtual school launching in 2022. The little girl, like most of her classmates and teachers, spends most of her day. Wears the Meta Quest 2 headset—a one-pound set of white goggles that extend over her eyes with a strap. She wears the headphones and takes them off for about three hours, reading a book, eating a sandwich, or hot-melting some tinfoil art. Her classmates are scattered in different towns, and her teachers are scattered all over the country. In the video, the little girl does not have any face-to-face interaction.
The virtual school is part of OptimaEd, a Florida-based company founded by Erika Donalds, a 43-year-old conservative education activist. This past academic year, the college enrolled more than 170 full-time students up to eighth grade from across Florida — a number that will roughly double at OptimaEd this fall. Beginning in third grade, full-time students wear the headphones for thirty to forty minutes at a time for four to five sessions, with built-in pauses so students don’t experience visual fatigue. (The younger students use Microsoft Teams and Canvas, doing something closer to regular virtual school.) In the afternoon, the children work on coursework independently, and the teacher can answer questions digitally.
OptimaEd was made possible because of Florida’s unique educational policy environment. The state was one of the pioneers of the school choice movement. Ever since Jeb Bush was governor, more than 2,000 years ago, Florida has offered various coupons to students from impoverished backgrounds, and later to students with disabilities, allowing them to purchase courses from companies like OptimaEd. Gov. Ron DeSantis expanded the program to make all students eligible for vouchers, funds that would otherwise go to public school education. This legislation makes it easier for parents to use state funds to purchase OptimaEd products. But the company is also rapidly expanding beyond Florida. This fall, it is offering VR services to students in Arizona (another state that supports school choice) and parts of Michigan.
OptimaEd positions its education as classical, emphasizing the intellectual traditions of Western civilization and the liberal arts. Lower grades learn phonics and illustrated sentences. Older people read great books and constitutions. Teachers often talk about virtues like courage and autonomy. “It’s a very traditional, back-to-basics education,” Donald said recently on a podcast.
Donald hails from the world of school choice activism in Florida. She’s well-known in Florida politics: Some of Donald’s closest activism allies founded Freedom Moms, which has become a leading conservative voice in the parent education rights movement, and Donald is on the group’s advisory board. She is also married to Congressman Byron Donalds, a rising star in the Republican Party who briefly ran for speaker of the 2023 House of Representatives. (Some Republicans in Florida encouraged him to run for governor after DeSantis stepped down.) The school choice and parental rights movements have sometimes dovetailed with the classical school movement, which has experienced a revival in the U.S. since the 1880s . While the former tends to focus on the shortcomings of public schools, the latter offers an alternative vision of education: one that evokes the ancient wisdom and traditions of the Western world, rather than using progressive pedagogies and frameworks to guide them.
Erika Donalds conducted an experiment in parental control over education. “I see a large and growing industry of à la carte education — the ability to customize the experience physically and geographically,” Donalds said. “We’re told that only certified teachers can teach in a traditional classroom setting. We know that’s not true.” She believes virtual reality schools have many of the benefits of in-person learning — real-time instruction, class reunions, field trips — while allowing families to create the schedule and community they want. If parents aren’t happy with any idea being pushed by their local public school, they can opt out by having their kids wear headphones. “If you entrust your child to us, you know the curriculum won’t contradict what you’re teaching at home,” she said.
Donald is a CPA, so it’s only fitting that her radicalization began with what’s called “the new math.” The Common Core, an effort to standardize grade-level learning across the country, was launched in 2010. The bipartisan Common Core initiative is led by policy experts who want to make U.S. students more globally competitive, partly in response to George W. A patchwork of standards. The Common Core leaders adopted techniques used in other industrialized nations, such as new strategies for mathematical reasoning, for example, where students may need to draw multi-step number lines to complete simple subtraction problems. Among the three sons of Donalds The oldest was in elementary school and, like many others, found the new process confusing. Donald started attending anti-Common Core rallies, wearing a T-shirt that said “Stop Common Core” with a stop sign on it and an apple with a worm in it. Critics on the left opposed the initiative’s emphasis on standardized testing; those on the right saw it as an example of excessive federal interference in local schools led by bureaucrats from far away in Washington. Part of the anti-Common Core movement Associated with the Tea Party, which ultimately helped launch Byron’s political career.
Erika Donalds ran for the local school board in 2014 and served for four years. But, during that time, she discovered a broader approach to changing the education landscape in Florida. Her husband had received an invitation to join the board of directors of Mason Classical Academy, a neoclassical charter school opening in Naples. The family was intrigued by this educational model, which they felt was an improvement over their public school experience because of its rigor and focus on direct contact with original texts. Byron Donalds joins Mason’s board of trustees, and Erika Donalds takes on an unpaid position in charge of accounting and administration to drive the launch of the school. All three of their sons eventually enrolled. Their actions became more focused. They’re not just advocating school choice. They hope to extend the classical model to the whole of the United States.
Over the next few years, Mason’s conflicts began to arise. Erica and Byron felt the school lacked proper supervision and planning. In 2019, a special prosecutor for the county school district found Mason’s mismanagement and ordered the resignation of two of Mason’s board members. (Mason called the report a “hoax,” and a separate review by a law firm hired by the school found no mismanagement.) Mason sued Erica Donalds and several others, alleging they conspired to take over Mason ; Donald filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which she called meritless. By then, the couple had taken the children out of school, and Erica Donalds began laying the groundwork for Optima. “I hate to see some bad decisions by bad people damage our sport,” she wrote to “friends and colleagues.”
Donald wanted to create and run a classical charter school using courses offered at Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan. (A later virtual academy didn’t use Hillsdale’s curriculum.) So far, Optima has opened five brick-and-mortar schools for which it provides administrative services. (Two of the schools later decided to go independent.) “These organizations are like multimillion-dollar businesses,” Donald told me. “I saw an opportunity to bring my skills into the industry.” Today, Optima has found ways to take its philosophy beyond charter schools. It recently began working as a subcontractor to conduct professional development training for the Tennessee Department of Education and hopes to consult with more state and local governments.
The open market created by school choice policies can sometimes obscure the use of public funds. The state of Mississippi is suing a virtual reality company called Lobaki, alleging it used funds allocated to benefits to create a virtual reality school. (Lobaki has denied misusing state welfare funds.) It was part of a dizzying corruption case involving a former governor, a retired professional wrestler and NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre. One of Lobaki’s co-founders, Vince Jordan, is now OptimaEd’s CTO. (Jordan denies all wrongdoing and stresses he no longer has anything to do with Lobaki.) When I raised the matter with Donald, she said she knew nothing about the lawsuit. The laws regulating charter schools can also be complex. This summer, the Florida Department of Education sent a letter to Optima Academy saying the virtual school would have to pay about $470,000 in fines for overenrolling non-resident students. Donald countered that the law doesn’t apply to charter schools and said they haven’t paid any fines.
In Florida, the pandemic has dramatically boosted school choices. Many families have expressed displeasure with the state-mandated remote learning experiment, but others have found they like the model. OptimaEd capitalized on this interest by marketing itself directly to homeschooling families and churches. “Pastors, are you ready to take a more active role in providing quality school options to your congregations and communities?” one flier read.
Support for school choice does not necessarily follow predictable racial and political lines.Black families tend to be more supportive of charter schools, education savings accounts, and private school vouchers and scholarships than other racial groups, according to the magazine education next step. “Many black and Latino families are happy to send their children to charter schools because, by and large, they want their children to go to what they think is the best school, and they’ll take advantage of the options available to them,” says Georgetown University think tank FutureEd’s policy Optima’s online academy reflects that diversity: Last year, 46 percent of its students were nonwhite, and one in five students was economically disadvantaged, says director Liz Cohen. Erica Downer Erika Donalds, whose own family is biracial: her husband is black and she is white, says she is often subjected to stereotypes that don’t match her family life. “The race card is for those who espouse conservative values.” ,” she told me. “Those who oppose our ideas try to discredit us by questioning our motives. “
