American K-12 schools are being funded by organizations with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as Parents Defending Education (PDE) has discovered via its investigation of “Little Red Classrooms.”
The research sent to 34 governors, legislators, and committee chairmen shows that millions of dollars with ties to China have made their way into American K-12 schools. According to PDE, Chinese Communist Party propaganda is taught to American students via Chinese language and culture classes.
The study uncovered 143 school districts in the United States that had entered into contracts to create Confucius Institutes and Classrooms, including some located near 20 U.S. military facilities and three of the nation’s top scientific and technology high schools. Confucius Institutes have long been hailed by the Chinese government as a means of achieving their foreign policy aims abroad. There are well-documented security issues regarding these China-led seminars in American institutions.
Concerning connections between the Chinese government and American K-12 institutions, have been uncovered by PDE Action. These institutions include the Simpson County Board of Education in Kentucky and North China Electric Power University. For the next 2020-2021 academic year, the Chinese International Education Foundation (CIEF) has urged the institution to deploy 34 Chinese educators to Simpson County Public Schools. A few Chinese immigrants who taught Mandarin in Delaware’s Appoquinimink School District in 2012-2013 were also featured in PDE Action.
The study discovered that schools in 34 states and DC had conducted monetary exchanges with the Chinese government or connected companies, with individual contracts ranging from a few thousand to more than a million dollars. The Chinese government has been using Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms for political purposes since 2009.
Due to mounting security concerns, the State Department deemed these China-linked projects a “foreign mission” in the summer of 2020. PDE Action requested the committee to launch a swift investigation, expose the Chinese government’s participation in American schools, and conduct hearings on the matter. As well as writing to Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, the group has written to influential lawmakers like Bernie Sanders and Bill Cassidy, asking them to ask the Arizona Department of Education to look into any connections between state-funded Chinese programs and Arizona’s public schools.
