A quick look at the website for the International Leadership of Texas (ILTexas) gives a picture of a prosperous free charter school that serves over 23,000 K-12 students at 22 physical campuses scattered across Texas. ILTexas Schools operates as a third-party nonprofit that can mask the funding ties to the Chinese Communist Party and, subsequently to the schools they serve. They may provide salaries for Chinese teachers and funding for Chinese cultural programs for the students. One of their most successful afterschool programs at the University of Oklahoma is patterned after an ILTexas model.
For fourteen years, Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), the largest school district in Oklahoma, has hosted ILTexas Chinese language and cultural program at one of its most prestigious magnet schools. In 2022, a newly elected school board member, E’Lena Ashley, was the first to vote against renewing the contract to continue the Confucius Institute’s center. The move by Ashley prompted an investigation by Oklahoma State School Superintendent Ryan Walters to investigate the Confucius Classrooms. In his report given at a September 19, 2023, meeting in Washington, DC, at the Early Child, Elementary, and Secondary Education (ECESE) Subcommittee meeting, Superintendent Walters stated he discovered a series of nonprofits that sponsored the TPS programs, all of which maintained an active connection with the CCP. Walters noted that the Federal Government’s 2020 crackdown on the programs at the University level had not diminished the number of Confucius Institutes as the CCP merely changed their emphasis to K-12 Institutes.
A bit of background: In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ambitious global infrastructure plan, the Belt-Road Initiative. As a rising world power, China would invest in projects in over 150 countries that would showcase China’s position as a rising world power while expanding its influence. The projects would culminate in 2049 to coincide with China’s 100-year founding of the People’s Republic of China.
While most developments consist of bricks and mortar projects, many do not. The CCP’s massive influence in US education recently came under scrutiny from Rep. Mike Waltz, who sounded an alarm about the CCP’s purchasing of strategically located US military academies with the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Waltz also expressed concerns about the schools using biased communist curricula.
This infringement in American schools should rouse every citizen. Looking at the history of the CCP’s invasion of US education, we gather insight into how to pray for God’s protection over our students.
In 2004, the CCP began establishing Confucius Institute “cultural” centers on US college and university campuses. By 2014, one hundred eighty-eight centers existed. The Trump Administration ruled that the State Department and the FBI scrutinize the institutes for promoting Chinese communist propaganda and stealing intellectual property, causing their numbers to diminish. Even after the Biden administration rescinded the Trump rule, the centers dwindled. However, they did not disappear. Many changed their name to the Center for Language and Education Cooperation, redirecting their focus to establishing nonprofit centers in our K-12 schools. The CCP boasts such “cultural centers” in over 500 US K-12 schools today. Other Confucius Institutes began working with the United Front Work Department, allowing them to function as an arm of the CCP on higher education campuses. Recently, several Congressional Republicans expressed their concerns over the CCP’s influence on primary and secondary school education through these newly formed “cultural” centers.
“The Chinese Government is betting that if it takes away the name ‘Confucius Institute’ and tweaks the program’s structure, no one will be the wiser.” Said Rachel Peterson, a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars.
Along with their public school endeavors, the CCP also focused on US private schools. On January 31, 2023, Congressman Mike Waltz sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin expressing his concerns about the CCP’s purchase of private schools across America.
Waltz specifically requested audits on two military academies with locations that presented national security risks. The Florida Preparatory Academy, a coeducational college-prep school for grades 5-12, houses an Air Force ROTC program. The school is near Melbourne, Florida’s space technology hub. Newopen Education Group purchased the military school in 2017. Newopen, a China-based company, that on its LinkedIn page describes itself as the most influential and valuable education group in China. Newopen manages two universities, five middle schools, two primary schools, and 31 kindergartens.
The New York Military Academy, which President Trump attended as a young man, also runs an Army JROTC program six miles from West Point. The Academy, purchased in 2015, is owned by the Research Center on Natural Conservation, backed by Chinese-based Fang Holdings Ltd.
The military academies are the tip of the iceberg. In December 2017, Primavera Capital, a China-based private equity firm, purchased a whole K-12 school system, the California-based Stratford School system, for approximately $500 million. Stratford boasts 30 separate locations, five in Southern California and 25 in the greater Bay Area.
Waltz’s alarm over the CCP’s illegitimate, unjustifiable efforts to influence the next generation of our citizens is something that even President George Washington expressed in 1799. Writing about the dangers of American youth educated in foreign schools that did not hold to the values of our American republic and freedoms, he said, It has always been a source of serious regret with me to see the youth of these United States sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education…contracting too frequently, not only habits of dissipation and extravagance, but principles unfriendly to Republican Government, and to the true and genuine liberty of mankind: which thereafter are rarely overcome (Schroeder pg 74 1989).
Turning our concerns into prayers, we can believe that God will protect and redeem education in America.
Originally posted on Intersessors for America.