As if parents didn’t have enough to watch out for in their children’s education, a report just released by a parent group called Parents Defending Education has added another worry to the ever-growing list. This watchdog group has uncovered funding from China — with a side dose of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda — in 143 K-12 schools across the nation.

Readers are perhaps familiar with the college-level brand of the Chinese educational propaganda project called Confucius Institutes. These institutes, under the guise of teaching language and culture, actually undermine American values such as free speech, freedom of religion, and rule of law. Similarly, the K-12 brand of this political indoctrination by a foreign enemy is known as Confucius Classrooms.

According to the Parents Defending Education report:

Further research reveals the People’s Republic of China fostered relationships with American K-12 schools through grants, sister school partnerships, and other programming since at least 2009.

Parents Defending Education tracked affiliations in 143 schools across 34 states and Washington, D.C. — and at least seven are still active. Financial exchanges between K-12 schools and the Chinese government range from a few thousand dollars to, in Thomas Jefferson High School’s case, more than a million dollars.

Disturbingly, the Chinese government’s ties appear to target school districts near 20 American military bases.

Just how much money has the CCP invested in its infiltration scheme? $17,967,565, to be exact. Many of the schools listed in the report are public schools, though there are a handful of private schools as well. Targeted schools range from the humble to the prestigious.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia is one such prestigious school. It has received money and developed ties with Tsinghua University High School. According to The Federalist’s Helen Raleigh, Tsinghua University High School is “affiliated with one of China’s top military schools, Tsinghua University, the alma mater of the CCP’s current leader, Xi Jinping.”

It is eerie that both the radical Left and the CCP are targeting our children. They both seem to know that if you want to change/destroy a culture, indoctrinating its children is a surefire way to start weakening the foundation. It’s also no coincidence that the radical Left and the Chinese are operating under the same communist/Marxist ideology.

As PJ Media’s Kevin Downey Jr. asks: “How many of these [Confucius Classroom] schools are teaching CRT? How many have ‘drag queen story hour’? More importantly, what is being done to stop this invasion of our nation’s schools?”

Though it seems like Congress intervening might be a little late, the House and Senate seem to be aware of at least some of the Chinese infiltration into the U.S. and are taking steps and writing bills to limit or stop them.

Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) has introduced a bill that would ban Chinese or Chinese-owned entities from “buying our farmland to setting up CCP police stations here on U.S. soil, stealing our intellectual property, spying on our military bases, and now buying their way into our children’s K-12 schools.”

As Raleigh points out, parents also need to push back at the local level. Moreover, laws need to be made to discourage schools unable to resist CCP money and clout.

It definitely makes an economic policy statement like GOP hopeful Ron DeSantis’s — particularly regarding divesting the U.S. from China — attractive. Combine that economic policy with banning TikTok and throwing the Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms out on their ears and perhaps some of the instigation in the culture wars will dissipate.

Either way, it’s more aggressive action from a nation that is antagonistic toward our own.