Is China Influencing What Your Child Is Learning in School?

Parents Defending Education has released a new report that offers some unsettling information about the reach of the People’s Republic of China in U.S. K-12 schools through so-called Confucius Classrooms.

“Confucius Classrooms are a program that is intended to teach children Chinese language and culture, which on its face sounds benign, but some of your viewers, listeners might remember Confucius Institutes, which were the corollary in the university system,” says Nicole Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education.

Parents Defending Education describes itself on its website as “a national grass-roots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas.”

“That’s something that [Cabinet] Secretaries [Betsy] DeVos and [Mike] Pompeo reined in during the Trump administration, because Confucius Institutes at the higher-ed level were actually found by the U.S. State Department to be considered foreign missions of the People’s Republic of China,” Neily says, adding:

And so, the fact that these are operating in K-12 schools across the country, even though we have, for the large part, reined in these programs at the higher-ed level, should really concern a lot of people.

Neily joins today’s episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss what’s being taught in Confucius Classrooms, some key takeaways of the report, and reactions from U.S. lawmakers about the report.