Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education revamped efforts to track foreign donations to postsecondary institutions. State lawmakers have never required the same oversight of international gifts to K-12 schools—until now.
Colleges and universities are required to report foreign gifts worth $250,000 or more to the U.S. Department of Education. For 2025, the agency reported $5.2 billion in such spending, including $528 million from China to colleges and universities (a total of $6.8 billion from China since 1986). But foreign countries and affiliated foundations are also giving to K-12 schools, contributions that afford international actors a level of influence over students in the U.S.
In fact, Stanford University students report that Chinese interests are trying to extract information from U.S. students in sensitive research areas (the subject of a recent congressional hearing). Apart from isolated cases such as these, lawmakers and taxpayers have little information about foreign gifts to elementary and secondary schools.
To remedy this, Georgia lawmakers approved a proposal on April 6 that would require public schools to report gifts and grants from entities in other countries. Legislators have sent the proposal to the governor.
This is good news for taxpayers. Foreign agents do not send gifts to educational institutions for nothing—generous grants create access to educators and students. Taxpayers should know how the spending is influencing classrooms.
Consider the Qatar Foundation International. QFI is the U.S.-based subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation, and it awards grants to K-12 schools ostensibly for academic and extracurricular programs in Arabic language and culture. But research has uncovered antisemitic and other discriminatory school activities linked to the spending.
QFI says it wants to “connect cultures” and “advance global citizenship,” but its favored programs are notably biased. Reporting from The Washington Free Beacon has found that QFI grants have funded “social justice” lessons in U.S. public schools, for example, not just Arabic textbooks.
QFI has advertised some of its programs, such as a “summer immersion institute” at a Houston school in July 2025 and spending on “teacher councils” around the world, but these do not tell the whole story. In Brooklyn, New York, an Arab culture arts classroom that receives funding from QFI displayed an inaccurate map of the “Arab World” that labeled Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza as a unified Palestine. (At a 2024 congressional hearing, then-Chancellor of New York City Public Schools David Banks said the map “was not part of the resources that came from the Qatar Foundation.” He asked the teacher to remove the map, but why was such material accessible in the first place?)
Photos posted by QFI on social media show a teacher at Manara Academy, a Texas charter school, hand-painting a map of the Israeli region. Her finished project erased the Jewish state altogether, instead depicting a single Palestine from the river to the sea, the outcome embraced by political movements and Islamist terrorist groups that reject Israel’s right to exist.
In September 2025, Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., chair of a congressional subcommittee on K-12 education, said, “At some schools in my home state of California, the antisemitic environment is so hostile that Jewish children are withdrawing and transferring elsewhere.”
Kiley’s subcommittee held a hearing on antisemitic activity in schools, and witnesses specifically cited Qatar in the discussion of antisemitic public school programs.
The Heritage Foundation produced model legislation that would provide more transparency over foreign grants to K-12 schools and postsecondary institutions, similar to the Georgia proposal.
Heritage’s model prohibits contracts between schools and countries of concern involving academic resources. State officials could use the model to call for a review of all spending from international interests, akin to the federal requirement on colleges and universities (Notably, the U.S. Department of Education reports that Qatar is the largest foreign funder of universities in the U.S., sending $8.8 billion to these institutions over the last 40 years).
Georgia lawmakers are taking seriously the discrimination and antisemitism orbiting foreign gifts to K-12 schools. Members of Congress have held hearings, and investigative reporters have gathered evidence, all of which gives state officials reason enough to consider new protections for American students.
Rebecca Rose participated in the Heritage Foundation Young Leaders Program in Spring 2026.
Jonathan Butcher is the Acting Director of the Center for Education Policy and Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, and the author of “Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth” (Post Hill Press/Bombardier Books, 2022).
Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By Rebecca Rose & Jonathan Butcher
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
Why would China or Arabs nations give money to American schools unless there is something for them in it, teachers going along with the propaganda and spreading it around should be tried for collaborating with the enemy. Where is the law, this is beyond fantastic. How about introducing the 101 on Christianity, would that work? Where stands the union on that one? We are drowning in the mess we’ve allowed to thrive and are paying those who spread it around.
Get foreign influence out of our schools, our kids are stupid enough now, because they are forced to swallow looney-toon swill as it is.
It’s not just foreign influences it’s the Democrat party. They are indoctrinating your children. You have no business raising them! They have to be good little Marxist children.
I don’t understand how this was ever allowed at all. Surely K-12 schools are not allowed to accept funds from a foreign country, most especially if that country has no students attending those schools.
If students from foreign countries are coming here, those students or their families should be the ones paying their tuition, not a foreign government.
And we wonder why our young students are demonstrating in antisemitic and/or pro-Palestinian marches on college/university campuses. Foreign professors indoctrinating them perhaps???
I’ve believed as far back as late 1960’s our education system began being infiltrated with professors whose purpose was to turn education into a ‘mind’ field to remove national pride and replace it with destructive ideologies. This was to create ‘the enemy from within’. Seems it has been working. And today’s teachers to K-12 students are their graduates several decades later.
Covid allowed parents to get a window in what their children were being taught, or not taught.
parents NEED to get involved FULLY in the education of their children
the days of allowing school boards and teachers to indoctrinate children must stop immediately!
No foreign monetary donations should be accepted and foreign students should be charged at least double tuition. If foreign money is accepted, it should all be disclosed no matter the amount.
Just one more example the American education complex is a brothel of whores. Pay and you’ll get unfettered access to their most treasured resource: The minds of our kids!
As usual, Congress fails to provide oversight and secure protections from the evil determinations of the leaders form distant lands to influence, overcome and displace American citizens. American citizens have been wasting their tax dollar for decades allowing this group of non-representational misfits to continue malfunctioning in office. Now, rather than eventualy, would be a good time to clean house.
So now the terrorist nations of the world are working to brainwash our youngest children. This is exactly the way Hitler worked to brainwash the kids in his Marxist plan. It is how all Communist, Marxist and Fascist brainwashing takes place. Up to now it was being done by our own evil, radical liberals and now the evil groups outside the U.S. are jumping in. Of course, this needs to be stopped NOW!!! We know how evil our radical liberals are and if we do not stop them NOW, we will lose everything we love about living in this great country. Pray for our nation.
Where are the “Gate-keepers? Do we even have laws against this? What can a parent do? They can’t even protest the library books their children are exposed to. Glad to hear of this account.
I had a long position as a substitute teacher back in 2002 teaching a two-week unit on Islam in a 7th-grade world history class in a middle school in Healdsburg (close to Santa Rosa, CA). I was appalled at what I was supposed to teach: have the students take a Muslim name, come dressed in Muslim attire, make a Muslim prayer rug, and memorize a scripture from the Koran – worshiping Allah. I did not do any of that.
I discovered that the World History Text book used back then called “Through the Centuries” was totally white washed of the truth about the spread of Islam through the world. It said nothing of the 800 million people who were brutally killed, mainly Christians and Jews, as Muslims spread their “religion of peace.” It is really “a religion of the sword.”
I remember the words written after a short description of the crusades. The text said, “The legacy left after the crusades was that the Jews and Christians hated each other, but the Muslims were tolerant of both religions.” There was nothing written about the true purpose of the crusades, a combined effort of Christians from many different countries to rid Jerusalem of Muslim rule and stop them from spreading into other countries. I also discovered that most of the world history text books have been taken over by Muslim publishers, so, of course, the real truth will not be written.
I also taught later in other classrooms where I had to show pro-Muslim videos – totally distorting history again and portraying Islam only in a good light. I’m sure it is much worse now. I understand the unit on Islam is much longer than just two weeks.
After visiting Germany in 2016 and seeing what has happened to the country after 2 million Muslims had been allowed in and the huge rise in crime, violence, and rape, I ended up writing a book that includes my experiences as a teacher and a warning to our nation. It is called Islam Rising, Christianity Waning in Europe and the USA.
I was also very concerned about the low number of Germans (maybe 5%) who are attending church and the huge number of Christian churches in Germany and other European nations that are no longer churches, but are now museums, concert halls or Muslim mosques. The same is going on in England, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and France.
It is alarming the huge number of mosques that are also expanding now in the USA – 330 in Texas; 180 in California, so many thousands more in Michigan and Minnesota. I also understand that the prisons are where much Muslim conversions are being made.
Yes, we do have a serious Islam indoctrination problem going on in our nation.
The scariest part is when Muslims run for office and are elected. How many mayors are prominent cities are now Muslims? How many elected officials in other positions; how many Muslim congressmen? Their ultimate goal is “Civilization Jihad.” They are told in the Koran to not assimilate, but to totally take over a nation and dominate it, also population wise – since they are the religion that continues to have lots of children – with a husband having many wives. They also want to bring in their form of government – Sharia law, which is the total opposite of our Constitution. It works best in a totalitarian regime like communism.
What can we do to try to stop their goals? It is a little late now – but try to stop the indoctrination in our public schools and universities. San Diego parents had a successful protest against their school district with the filing of a lawsuit in 2017 that ended a partnership that the San Diego Unified School District had made with CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relationships), which has ties to Islamic terrorist groups and the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR had persuaded the school board to allow a very pro-Muslim curriculum to be brought into the schools, including celebrating Muslim holidays; have rooms set aside as prayer rooms; provide special training (indoctrination) for teachers and staff; have more pro-Muslim books in the library and in the curriculum. All this was under the guise of stopping bullying and “islamophobia.” But well-informed and activated parents were able to organize and stop these plans from progressing. The law firm that represented them was the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, but there are also many similar great law firms who represent concerned Christian parents free of charge.
Money talks