Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles wants to partner with a Chinese university to provide language and culture lessons in the district, a once-popular model that dozens of schools and universities have recently abandoned amid conservative criticism about links to the Chinese Communist Party.
HISD’s state-appointed board of managers is scheduled to vote Thursday on Miles’ request to create a “Confucius Institute” with the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, a school located in China’s eighth-largest city. Under the agreement, HISD would welcome visiting Chinese teachers vetted by the Chinese government and take part in annual student exchanges.
A two-page document posted online Monday did not state how many of HISD’s roughly 270 schools would gain new teachers or how the program would influence teaching, learning and extracurriculars at participating campuses.
HISD did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The district operates a roughly 750-student Mandarin Chinese immersion school, but it otherwise offers few Chinese language classes.
Confucius Institutes became popular starting in the mid-2000s, with various reports suggesting hundreds of U.S. school districts, colleges and universities formed partnerships with educational institutions in China. The programs generally involved teaching the Chinese language to American students, and sometimes included lessons on Chinese culture.
HISD joined the fad in the 2010s, hosting Confucius Classrooms at several schools through a partnership with Texas Southern University .
But nearly all Confucius Institutes programs have shut down in recent years — including those at HISD and Texas Southern — amid worsening U.S.-China ties and political backlash from Republicans. In 2019, Congress passed a sweeping defense bill that included a provision allowing the federal government to withhold funds from higher education institutions that offered Chinese language instruction through a Confucius Institute.
“The fact that Houston’s interested in reengaging in one of these is actually pretty interesting because it’s going against the trend,” said Ian Oxnevad, a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, or NAS, a conservative-leaning advocacy nonprofit that has studied Confucius Institutes.
To Republican critics, the Confucius Institutes are a way for China to exert “soft power” over the U.S., exposing Americans to aspects of Chinese culture they may view positively. U.S. government officials and numerous global organizations have documented extensive human rights abuses, espionage campaigns and theft of intellectual property tied to the Chinese Communist Party.
A 2019 report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations examining Confucius Institutes also raised concern that the programs could “compromise academic freedom.” The Chinese educators that teach in American classrooms through the program receive oversight from the Chinese ministry of education and pledge to avoid topics like the independence of Taiwan or the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the report said.
In HISD’s case, the proposed Chinese university partner faced accusations in 2022 that it funded a Dutch academic center that pushed false information downplaying China’s role in human rights abuses against its Uyghur population.
Some conservative politicians, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, have gone further in criticizing Confucius Institutes, labeling them as fronts for the Chinese government to surveil and brainwash U.S. college students. Chinese officials deny those claims , and few Democratic officials have been as animated on the issue.
“Communist China is infiltrating American universities to meddle with our curricula, silence criticism of their regime, and steal intellectual property,” Cruz said in 2018. “The Confucius Institutes are the velvet glove around the iron fist of their campaigns on our campuses.”
Tim Schlosser, the superintendent of Simpson County Schools in Kentucky, said his district’s Confucius Institute has helped provide Chinese language and culture courses since 2019 — with no reports of foreign spying or proselytizing.
However, the district is ending its partnership at the end of this school year, partially due to “controversy” surrounding the program from outside the 3,000-student district, Schlosser said. The Chinese government had provided money to cover a small part of the Chinese teachers’ salaries, which Simpson County Schools will pay going forward to maintain the teachers, he said.
“There’s no trying to convert people to communism or anything of that nature,” Schlosser said. “They do Chinese cooking classes through our community (education) program that are full every month. That’s what it did for us, and it offered us another foreign language at the high school.”
HISD historically has not emphasized Chinese language classes in the district.
One report from 2020-21 , the most recent year with available data, showed that middle and high school enrollment in Chinese language classes totaled about 1,670, equal to less than 2 percent of students in those grades. In recent years, roughly 50 to 100 students have taken the Advanced Placement Chinese Language and Culture exam annually, district data shows.
HISD’s board of managers pulled the Confucius Institute proposal from the consent agenda for Thursday’s meeting, meaning that one or more members may want to discuss the issue further before they potentially vote on the partnership.
Asher Lehrer-Small covers education for the Landing and would love to hear your tips, questions and story ideas about Houston ISD. Reach him at asher@houstonlanding.org .
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