High School Hit With Two Federal Probes, IRS Complaint For Race Discrimination And CCP Ties
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Fairfax County, Virginia, became something of a household name in recent years, with a challenge to an allegedly racially discriminatory admissions scheme nearly reaching the U.S. Supreme Court and the school essentially selling proprietary education information to the Chinese. Despite the high court refusing to take the slam-dunk affirmative action case, the school is now being investigated from multiple angles by the Trump administration.
In the past two weeks, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have opened tandem civil rights investigations into TJ, often called the country’s top public high school, and most recently, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) received a request to investigate the school’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
IRS Complaint
“Through a jaw-dropping series of emails and documents by way of a public records request, Defending Education has uncovered what appears to be evidence of multiple violations of federal tax law in Fairfax County Public Schools,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education, the group that filed the IRS complaint, told The Federalist. “Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology — one of the nation’s elite high schools — appears to have allowed China-affiliated groups to use the school’s name and likeness to create similar schools in China in exchange for payments reported as ‘charitable donations’ by Thomas Jefferson’s affiliated non-profit fund.”
According to the complaint, the elite school gave things like curricula, syllabi, and even building plans for schools to CCP-linked organizations, which returned the favor with $3.6 million in tax-exempt donations to a nonprofit affiliated with TJ, the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund (TJPF). Apparently, the nonprofit was somehow able to share the intellectual property of a public school with the CCP, no questions asked.
Defending Education wants TJPF to be stripped of its tax-exempt status for serving as the middleman in the deals between the school and the CCP-affiliated groups. The nonprofit was organized in 1999 to raise funds for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-related infrastructure and research ability.
From 2014 to 2018, TJPF received $1.2 million from Tsinghua University High School and $900,000 from the Ameson Foundation, while from 2016 to 2021 it received $1.5 million from Shirble HK. Simultaneously, school administrators were sharing school information with the groups in order to “clone” TJ, and now there are numerous copy-paste replicas operating in China.
The complaint states that the nonprofit reported the payments as “charitable” on 990 documents to the IRS, and that despite claiming to be a “separate and independent” entity from the public high school, TJPF uses publicly funded “office space, email accounts, administrative services, and other operational resources” at TJ.
“The deal involved Chinese contractors paying the school and its nonprofit fund $3.6 million for intellectual property, professional development, blueprints of the school, in-depth photos of school labs, and research projects created by students,” Parshall Perry said. “Now, we’ve learned that the Fairfax County Public Schools staff appeared to undercut the TJ principal regarding partnerships with China-affiliated groups and that the principal herself appeared to lie about partnerships with Chinese contractors. These are questions that demand answers — we are hopeful that the federal government will pay attention to what might be happening within the beltway and turn its investigative powers into what exactly is happening in Thomas Jefferson High School.”
TJPF did not respond to a request for comment from The Federalist.
Education and Justice Investigations
Both the Departments of Education and Justice recently opened investigations into TJ as well, based on well-reported evidence of a racialized admissions scheme that artificially gave an advantage to non-Asian applicants.
Despite TJ being a public school, it is a magnet school, or what is known as a Governor’s School in Virginia, meaning they are supposed to have a competitive application process for admission.
The Supreme Court declined to take a case alleging TJ was using an unconstitutional affirmative action scheme, despite having already overturned the practice in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito said: “What the Fourth Circuit majority held, in essence, is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional so long as it is not too severe. This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction.”
But the refusal from the high court does not mean TJ is off the hook.
The Department of Justice launched a civil rights Title VI inquiry into TJ after Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares referred the case to the federal government.
“My office found that FCPS knowingly and deliberately overhauled Thomas Jefferson High School’s merit-based admissions policy to reduce opportunities for Asian American students,” Miyares wrote.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon confirmed the opening of an investigation on May 21, and the very next day, the Department of Education announced it was also launching a civil rights investigation based on Miyares’s report.
Miyares’ office noted, among other things, that Fairfax County School Board “overhauled” the admissions process at TJ “with the intention to deny Asian American students the opportunity to attend one of the [premier] public high schools in the United States.” A fact sheet from the Virginia attorney general’s office cited messages from members of the school board recognizing the policy’s anti-Asian design, and subsequent data showing Asian admissions into TJ reduced from 73 percent to 54 percent in just one year.
“Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County has long had a reputation for producing some of our nation’s brightest minds, due in no small part to its rigorous admissions process,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press release. “The Fairfax County School Board’s alleged decision to weigh race in TJ’s admissions decisions appears to be both contrary to the law and to the fundamental principle that students should be evaluated on their merit, not the color of their skin.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., called TJ’s policy “purposefully engineered to discriminate,” adding, “Virginia students’ dreams were illegally denied because of their race. Not merit, but race.”
Breccan F. Thies is a correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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