Communist Chinese Provide STEM Curriculum for Top Virginia Government School

We know the Dean of the Business School at Harvard is on the Board of a Communist Chinese firm, in China.  Now we find, the Communists are buying up the curriculum of American schools.  Want an American education?  You better vet the curriculum of your child’s school-and who is behind it.

“An elite public high school in northern Virginia handed over its world-class STEM curriculum to Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks at the same time the groups donated $3.6 million to the school’s affiliated charity. That charity should be stripped of its tax privileges and forced to pay a hefty price to the IRS for facilitating the information exchange, a watchdog organization charged in a complaint filed Tuesday.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology was consistently ranked the nation’s top public high school when it provided its academic blueprints to a trio of CCP-linked organizations, which used the documents to launch at least 20 copy-cat “Thomas Schools” that operate today in China. From 2014 through 2021, those same China-affiliated organizations transferred $3.6 million to the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund, the school’s affiliate charity which operates out of its Fairfax County building.”

Top US High School Traded Curriculum for Donations in Secretive Business Deals With CCP-Tied Groups, IRS Complaint Says

Selling academic blueprints to a foreign adversary is ‘completely unrelated’ to any charitable purpose, Defending Education charges in IRS complaint

Andrew Kerr, Washington Free Beacon,  5/27/25  https://freebeacon.com/national-security/top-us-high-school-traded-curriculum-for-donations-in-secretive-business-deals-with-ccp-tied-groups-irs-complaint-says/

An elite public high school in northern Virginia handed over its world-class STEM curriculum to Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks at the same time the groups donated $3.6 million to the school’s affiliated charity. That charity should be stripped of its tax privileges and forced to pay a hefty price to the IRS for facilitating the information exchange, a watchdog organization charged in a complaint filed Tuesday.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology was consistently ranked the nation’s top public high school when it provided its academic blueprints to a trio of CCP-linked organizations, which used the documents to launch at least 20 copy-cat “Thomas Schools” that operate today in China. From 2014 through 2021, those same China-affiliated organizations transferred $3.6 million to the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund, the school’s affiliate charity which operates out of its Fairfax County building. The Partnership Fund described the payments as charitable contributions in its reports to the IRS in what the watchdog group Defending Education alleges is a clear violation of federal tax law.

In its IRS complaint, Defending Education alleged the payments the Partnership Fund received from the CCP-linked groups were hardly charitable contributions, but rather payments in return for Thomas Jefferson High School’s academic blueprints. But the selling of an elite American high school’s playbook to organizations associated with a foreign adversary is “completely unrelated” to any valid charitable purpose listed in the federal tax code, Defending Education stated in the complaint.

“The facts strongly suggest that the Fund operated as a pass-through to sell the intellectual property of Thomas Jefferson High School—America’s premier public high school and a legally distinct entity—to organizations linked to the Chinese government, in exchange for capital improvement funding for the school,” Defending Education stated in its complaint, which urged the IRS to consider the $3.6 million paid to the Partnership Fund as taxable business income and then strip it of its tax-exempt status.

“We believe this evidently improper federal tax reporting is troubling enough to get the IRS’s attention, and we’re hoping to receive answers to these questions in due time,” said Defending Education vice president and legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry.” American taxpayers deserve to know what they’re funding—especially when those funds could be used for partnerships in a nation overtly hostile to American interests.”

If Defending Education gets its way, the Partnership Fund could be hit with a tax bill north of $756,000, which would have a devastating impact on its bottom line. The Partnership Fund ended its 2022 fiscal year with cash reserves of just over $1.5 million, according to its latest available financial disclosure.

Documents obtained by the watchdog group show the Partnership Fund provided Thomas Jefferson High School’s academic blueprints to Shirble HK, the Ameson Foundation, and Tsinghua University High School, the latter of which is partnered with a Chinese university of the same name that shares close ties to the People’s Liberation Army. The elite magnet school provided exhaustive and granular information about its operations to the CCP-linked groups, including its curriculum, academic calendar, physical floor plans, attendance policy, guidance intervention strategies, and “in-depth” photos of its research labs.

And Thomas Jefferson High School dutifully complied with the requests, even though the school’s administrators knew the CCP-linked institutions planned to use the blueprints to launch their own copy-cat “Thomas Schools” in China, the documents show.

The IRS complaint comes at a turbulent time for the elite magnet school, which faces several investigations by state and federal agencies for allegedly discriminating against Asian American students when it overhauled its admission practices in late 2020 to prioritise DEI. On Wednesday, Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares referred Thomas Jefferson High School to the Departments of Justice and Education, both of which have since launched civil rights investigations into its admission practices. The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the school’s admission practices in February 2024, much to the dismay of conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.

Thomas Jefferson High School’s DEI-centric admissions practices contributed to marked decline in the school’s academic prestige, falling to 14th place in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings. But the more than 20 replica “Thomas Schools” that now operate in China operate with the school’s blueprints from before it revamped its admission practices in late 2020 when it consistently dominated the rankings as the number one high school in the country.

A January 2018 email attached in Defending Education’s IRS complaint shows then-Thomas Jefferson High School principal Ann Bonitatibus discussing the transfer of her school’s blueprints to the Ameson Foundation in return for a $1 million payment to the Partnership Fund. Ameson founder Sean Zhang shares ties with China’s United Front Work Department, which works to “co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition” to the CCP, according to a 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

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,” a document attached to a Jan. 2, 2018, email sent to Bonitatibus stated. “Curriculum has already been done; now want to talk about building schools.”

Ameson ultimately paid $900,000 to the Partnership Fund as part of that contract, according to Defending Education. Bonitatibus stepped down as principal of Thomas Jefferson High School in October to serve as executive director of talent acquisition for Fairfax County Public Schools.

The Partnership Fund also provided its Chinese benefactors direct access to the public school’s teachers, according to the documents obtained by Defending Education.

A Partnership Fund employee sent an email in 2017 stating the contract it signed with Tsinghua University High School “required” them “to send two educators to them for a week,” Defending Education stated in its IRS complaint. That level of access didn’t come cheap for Tsinghua University High School, which paid $1.2 million to the Partnership Fund from 2014 through 2018.

Later, in 2019, the Partnership Fund’s outreach and partnership manager, Sally Zabel, offered to pay a Thomas Jefferson High School teacher to draft an exhaustive summary of his physics course on behalf of Shirble HK, a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands that operates department stores in China and provides consulting services in the communist country.

“I have a special request for you,” Zabel emailed the physics teacher on June 11, 2019. “Our current International Partners, Shirble, have specifically asked to know more about some of our courses as they are going to work on building some of their own, similar to ours.”

“They would like to know more about the curriculum design/pace of the year, equipment/books/materials needed, class layout, and possible student projects/paper topics for their own version of the classes,” Zabel added.

Shirble is hardly just a Chinese department store, the Washington Examiner reported. Its former chairman, Yang Xiangbo, attended several sessions of the United Front’s “Chinese People’s Political Consultive Conference” and boasted on the firm’s website that CCP officials visited the company’s stores “to guide the work and put forward ardent expectations for Shirble.” Yang died in 2020, and Shirble HK contributed $1.5 million to the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund from 2016 through 2021.

“Defending Education’s IRS complaint illustrates the extent to which the CCP has infiltrated America’s classrooms,” House Committee on Education and Workforce chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) told the Washington Free Beacon.