Assessing and Addressing Foreign Influence in K-12

A decade ago, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) into law, calling it “a Christmas miracle: a bipartisan bill signing right here.” ESSA’s bipartisan passage reflected exhaustion and anger from both sides of the aisle with the Obama Administration’s federal overreach; the Wall Street Journal even called it “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter century.”

That proved to be a massive overstatement. ESSA effectively codified the federal government’s pre-2008 role in K-12 education, and now that President Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon are working to truly send education back to the states, Congress can’t seem to agree about much of anything in education.

With one notable exception: assessing and addressing foreign influence in public education. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed three bills to this effect, each with full Republican support and 30 or more Democratic Representatives voting in favor.

The Transparency in Reporting Adversarial Contributions in Education Act (TRACE) requires schools to make available – upon parental request – any funding, curricular materials, or memorandum of understanding with a foreign country or a foreign entity of concern. The Combatting Lies of Authoritarians in School Systems Act (CLASS) requires school districts to report foreign funding or contributions of over $10,000 to the Secretary of Education. The Promoting Responsible Oversight to Eliminate Communist Teachings for our Kids Act (PROTECT) presents school districts with a simple choice: you can either take money from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or from the U.S. Federal Government.

Aside from the fun acronyms, it’s easy to see how these bills – which reflect ideas from the America First Agenda – gained bipartisan traction: these America First policies are simply common sense.

What’s more, the arguments against addressing foreign influence in American education are weak and self-contradictory. For example, Representative Bobby Scott, the ranking member of the House Education & Workforce Committee, stated that “there is no evidence that K-12 schools are under any threat from misinformation or covert influence by authoritarian foreign governments in any measurable way.” He also argued that “school districts already facing shortages of teachers, counselors, and support staff now will have to divert critical time and resources from instruction to completing bureaucratic paperwork.”

But of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

With 14,000 school districts, and no public reporting requirements, there is no way to know whether our schools are under significant, sporadic, or negligible influence by foreign governments. Assuming that there is minimal adversarial influence, legislation addressing that foreign influence would not force school districts to re-allocate staff time to significant paperwork. Schools would only face more red tape if there is foreign influence from the CCP or other adversarial foreign funding streams.

These bills have now been referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. With so many competing interests for Senate floor time, it’s unlikely that we’ll see another bipartisan miracle in K-12 education before Christmas. But the bipartisan support in the House of Representatives indicates that there is a clear national interest in foreign funding. Parents deserve to know whether their children’s education is all-American, or whether there is another nation’s interest influencing curriculum and instruction.