Top US High School Traded Curriculum for Donations in Secretive Business Deals With CCP-Tied Groups, IRS Complaint Says
27th May 2025
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.