Why Did This U.S. Public School Take Millions From China? Here’s The Story That Will Shock You.

A couple of weeks ago, Kamala Harris’ campaign went after me because I said that the Department of Education, along with the public school system, should be burned to the ground, figuratively speaking. Kamala’s campaign didn’t make any kind of argument refuting my position. They just suggested that what I said was crazy, because how can you possibly have a functioning country without a Department of Education? It’s not like we invented the telephone, won two world wars, or landed on the moon without a Department of Education. We definitely needed a Department of Education to do all of that stuff. And I responded to Kamala Harris’ campaign, outlining all of the reasons why the Department of Education and our public school system are a complete disaster.

What I didn’t talk about at the time — and what almost no one ever talks about in this country — is what the alternative is. It’s one thing to point out failures. It’s another thing to suggest tangible improvements. What does it look like to have political leaders who actually care about the education system of their country, and want to make it as good as it can possibly be? What should those leaders be doing, exactly?

This week, thanks to reporting from National Review and The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak, we know what they’ve been doing in China. It turns out that officials in China are very serious about improving their education system — to the point that they’ve effectively cloned the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. 

If you’re not familiar with it, Thomas Jefferson — until recently — was the number-one public high school in the United States. In China, they now have 20 so-called “Thomas Schools,” all of which are clones of the Thomas Jefferson school in Fairfax. These Chinese “Thomas School” clones have copied pretty much everything from the Thomas Jefferson School in the United States, including curriculums and floor plans. Say what you will about China, but they’re in this to win. They’re playing for keeps, and they’re willing to steal from their opponents if necessary — just like, say, Bill Belichick or the Houston Astros.

Except in this case, there wasn’t actually much stealing involved. It turns out that Thomas Jefferson handed all of this information over voluntarily. The story of how exactly China managed to clone Thomas Jefferson raises a lot of obvious concerns from a national security perspective, and the word “treason” might cross your mind as you hear the details. I’ll go into that shortly.

But first, it’s important to note that there’s one aspect of our Thomas Jefferson that China hasn’t copied. They didn’t clone Thomas Jefferson’s new DEI admissions policy, which was implemented a few years ago. This DEI admissions policy got rid of standardized tests. It also gave bonuses to applicants who couldn’t speak proper English, and implemented a quota system so that every middle school in Fairfax County got an equal number of slots in the new class at Thomas Jefferson. The result is that student quality has dropped by nearly 40%, as measured by the number of national merit semifinalists that Thomas Jefferson produces. Thomas Jefferson is no longer the top public high school in the United States. It was too exceptional and too impressive, so the liberals running Fairfax County, and the administrators of the school, decided to destroy it. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.

But before they ruined it, they raised a lot of money from the Communist Party of China. From 2014 to 2021, entities in China sent more than $3.5 million to something called the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund. This is a nonprofit that was set up to raise money for a renovation of Thomas Jefferson. The nonprofit was based in the school and had the school principal on its board, so there’s obviously a very close relationship there.

So what did China get in exchange for this $3.5 million? When we first learned about these payments around a year ago, we didn’t have a lot of detail on that question. Here’s a report from last year:

So, we learned there were payments coming into Fairfax from China, but we didn’t know exactly what they were for. Now we do. According to National Review, in addition to course materials and outlines, Chinese officials wanted to learn about “construction and administration” at the school, as well as “extensive advice on how to manage a school like Thomas Jefferson.” 

Thomas Jefferson’s director of student services even wrote in an email that the Chinese wanted a handbook that would tell them how to “clone” the school — including research output from students. From National Review: “Foreign ‘donations’ came with a few requests: that [Thomas Jefferson nonprofit] hand over blueprints, floor plans, curricula, lab photographs, and thumb drives with Senior Student Research projects. … Chinese officials requested, and gained access to, examples of past student research projects, without student consent.”

Maybe the Chinese wanted these senior research projects because they involved materials that students created alongside the leading research institutes in the United States, including the NIH and George Washington University. So there are obvious espionage-related implications here as well.

To be clear, there’s no question that senior leaders at Thomas Jefferson were aware that all of this was going on. There’s even an email from Thomas Jefferson’s assistant principal, in which he says that the nonprofit has a contract with a Chinese foundation, “that they will pay $1 million in exchange for help getting their schools up and running in China, called the Thomas Schools.” Some of these Chinese officials also visited the school.

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On top of that, there’s evidence that the Fairfax County Public School system tried to cover up what it was doing. The group that actually uncovered this scheme, and which led to the National Review’s reporting, is called Parents Defending Education, or PDE. They spent more than a year working on this story. And it only took so long because of all the roadblocks that Fairfax County put in their way. When PDE made a public records request seeking information about the schools’ coordination with China, Fairfax County tried to charge them nearly $36,000 in fees in order to produce the documents. They probably expected that would scare PDE off. But it didn’t work. The group ended up paying $18,000 for some of the documents, which ultimately exposed what was going on.

The word “treason” gets thrown around a lot these days. And there’s a lot of discussion about how difficult it is to prove treason under the U.S. Constitution and so on. But if we’re speaking in the colloquial sense of the word, this seems a lot like treason. These people were orchestrating the sale of proprietary information to China, to benefit Chinese schools, while simultaneously kneecapping our own schools with DEI admissions policies. They didn’t sell those DEI admissions policies to China because everyone involved knows that they’re garbage. They’re worse than useless. And the proponents of DEI themselves seem to recognize that, at least when it comes time to make some money from the Chinese Communist Party.

The whole scam is reminiscent of how Chinese billionaires will promote transgenderism in the United States, but not in China. It’s deliberate sabotage from the people running the single most successful school district in the United States, in Fairfax County — which is also home to CIA headquarters and much of the intelligence community, along with the workforce at the Pentagon. The former principal of Thomas Jefferson, Evan Glazer, even suggested that he didn’t think twice about giving inside info to our chief foreign adversary because it would be racist to discriminate based on national origin. But when it comes to discriminating against students using affirmative action admissions policies, school administrators in Fairfax have no objection.

There have been a lot of parents speaking out at school board meetings over the past few years. They’ve been complaining about the poor quality of their childrens’ education, since many schools are now graduating students who can’t even read. Parents have also been understandably furious about the deliberate efforts to indoctrinate their children with gender ideology and to expose them to explicit pornography in some cases. Some of those parents, as you might remember, were investigated by the DOJ. Meanwhile we’re allowing China to copy the blueprint of our most successful schools, and the DOJ hasn’t said a word. You won’t find a clearer illustration of why our entire education system is in a tailspin.

Right now the government officials who are truly interested in our education system aren’t located in Washington. They probably aren’t working for your local school board either. Thanks to the work of Parents Defending Education, we know that, unfortunately for children in this country, they’re in Beijing.