A Virginia school district provided the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with the curriculum of one of America’s leading STEM schools.
Chinese entities gave $3.6 million to the high school though the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund between 2014 and 2021, National Review reported. In exchange, China received information that it used to create 20 of its own STEM schools.
China’s schools are called the “Thomas Schools.”
According to Parents Defending Education (PDE), which provided National Review with the information, what the high school considered “donations” are likely intellectual property payments.
The partnership fund was asked to provide blueprints, floor plans, thumb drives, and photographs of the high school.
According to the report, agreements were arranged with the fund through Tsinghua University and the Ameson Foundation, whose founder is connected to the CCP’s United Front Work Department.
Although Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) claimed the fund was a “separate and independent entity,” a spokesperson for FCPS admitted that it had a “formal relationship” with the Ameson Foundation until 2018.
A 2018 email from the high school’s assistant principal said that the partnership fund “has a contract with Ameson that they will pay $1M in exchange for help in getting their schools up and running in China. Called the Thomas Schools.”
The Thomas Schools’ website says the schools are “modelled after the curriculum, pedagogy, and philosophy of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, United States, combine the finest in traditional Chinese culture with the core values of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the leading high school for STEM education in the US.”
National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood said last year that China’s infiltration into American K-12 schools is “almost everywhere.”
The scholar argued that China’s influence could be seen most often in schools that “feed” into elite colleges and universities, explaining that “in every state that we’ve looked at, we have found instances of it, but I would say it’s concentrated in the feeder schools to elite education, which means mostly West Coast and East Coast, but not exclusively those.”
