How Will Trump’s Supporters React to Seeing School Vouchers Program Increase Chinese Influence?

In September 2023, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stunned school choice advocates when he kicked out four private schools from the state’s school voucher program. The schools’ offense, according to the state’s announcement, was their “direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” which were seen as “an imminent threat to the health, safety, and welfare of these school’s [sic] students and the public.” The alleged “ties” were not explained in the announcement.

What was surprising about the announcement was that Florida has long been regarded as being “number one in education freedom” by school choice advocates, and its largely unregulated voucher market, along with those of other states, has been described as the “wild west of school voucher expansions.”

A report on the state’s announcement by WFTV explained that the governor’s decision was likely due to the for-profit owner of these schools, Spring Education Group, “controlled by Primavera Holdings Limited,” which is a reference to Primavera Capital, a private equity investment firm based in Hong Kong.

Spring Education Group is one of the largest operators of private schools in the U.S., overseeing more than 200 schools in 19 states. The company’s schools are considered prestigious and include Stratford School, LePort Montessori Schools, Nobel Learning Communities, and BASIS Independent Schools. In a written statement to WFTV, spokespersons representing the four Florida schools, banned from the voucher program, stated, “We are regularly acknowledged as one of the best private schools in our area and have a track record of delivering outstanding educational outcomes, which is why parents choose us. Our schools are locally run, abide by local, state, and federal laws, and do not have ties to any government or political party.”

Nevertheless, when the New York Post, a conservative tabloid owned by right-wing firebrand Rupert Murdoch, caught wind of this story from Florida, it reported that “[a] group of elite private schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn,” operated by BASIS Independent Schools, were sold to Spring Education Group in 2019. “Primavera’s chairman and CEO is Fred Zuliu Hu, who has previously been named as a one-time senior member of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The article further said that “While BASIS schools tell parents in a disclaimer that its parent company, Spring Education Group, is controlled by Primavera, which it says, ‘is itself owned by Chinese persons residing in Hong Kong,’ the schools do not acknowledge the Communist link. Primavera dispute[s] that Hu is currently a Communist Party member.”

But concerns about Spring Education Group and Primavera continued to be a flashpoint among conservative lawmakers and advocates in other states.

In February 2024, Republican U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote a high-profile letter to then-U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressing concerns about another company associated with Primavera Capital called Tutor.com. “Tutor.com is a long-standing provider of tutoring services to our service members and their families,” Cotton wrote, and its acquisition by “a Chinese-owned corporation,” along with the Princeton Review in 2022, concerned him. “Tutor.com collects personal data on users,” the senator said, “such as location, internet protocol addresses, and contents of the tutoring sessions.” That business arrangement, Cotton maintained, was akin to “paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Cotton’s letter quickly caught the attention of multiple right-wing advocacy groups. In March 2024, Parents Defending Education, a conservative astroturf organization that accuses public schools and universities of spreading “transgender ideology” and liberal “indoctrination,” issued a “non-exhaustive list of school districts that give students access to Tutor.com.” (In 2025, Parents Defending Education rebranded to Defending Education.)

The New York Post promptly amplified the concerns of Parents Defending Education, reporting that Tutor.com was assisting the Chinese government in “infiltrating American classrooms.” Picking up the New York Post’s conspiratorial language, another conservative group critical of public schools, Freedom in Education, “uncovered” evidence of Tutor.com facilitating “infiltration of Chinese spyware” in schools in Georgia.

By December 2025, it was no longer “clear” if Primavera divested from Tutor.com or still owned shares, according to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing media site funded by billionaire Paul Singer, a hedge fund manager and “major donor to Republican political candidates.” But, pointing to the connection between Primavera and Spring Education Group, the article stated, “There are also signs of [China’s] new approach to influencing elementary and high schools: just buy… [the schools]. … The expansion of groups like Spring Education into the American educational landscape comes as American youth are increasingly open to far left socialist economic ideology, as evidenced by the election of [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani.”

Also in December, another news outlet in the right-wing media echo chamber, Texas Scorecard, warned readers of Primavera’s connections to the Spring Education Group and its ownership of 13 schools in the Lone Star State. The article was published around the time Texas debuted a $1 billion school voucher program.

In other states, which like Florida have largely unregulated school voucher programs, state tax dollars are already flowing to private schools operated by Spring Education Group. In North Carolina, Spring Education Group operates eight schools, two of which are participating in the state’s voucher program (the other six are preschool-only programs, which are ineligible for North Carolina voucher money). Those two schools, Chesterbrook Academy Elementary and Middle School in Cary and Chesterbrook Academy Preschools and Elementary in Raleigh, received $106,778 and $49,475, respectively, in public funds in the 2024–2025 school year, according to state government reporting.

Yet, despite the conservative movement’s fears about Chinese communist influence in America’s education system, many red state officials and advocacy groups are opting into a new federal program created by the Trump administration that may lead to huge financial payouts to education companies like Spring Education Group and Tutor.com and, in turn, their private investors, including Primavera Capital.

Who’s Hu

Conservative rumors about ties between Primavera and its founder, Fred Hu—who also goes by Fred Zuliu Hu, Zu Liu Hu, and Zuliu Hu on English language sites—to the Chinese Communist Party have some basis in fact.

According to multiple websites, including Chinese ones that Our Schools translated into English with the help of researchers, an individual named Hu Zuliu [Fred Hu] served multiple terms, from 2008 through at least 2023, as a delegate in the Hunan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), economic sector. According to the CPPCC’s official website, “The CPPCC is an organization in the patriotic united front of the Chinese people, an important organ for multiparty cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and an important means of promoting socialist democracy in China’s political activities.”

“In 2008, Hu Zuliu was elected as a member of the 10th Hunan Provincial Committee of the CPPCC, and in 2013, he was reelected as a member of the 11th CPPCC,” according to Primavera Capital’s Chinese-language website.

The Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank founded in 2010 by investor-philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen, describes Hu as having “advised the Chinese government.”

Hu’s Columbia Business School bio describes him as the founder of Primavera Capital and a partner at Goldman Sachs Group, who also “served at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., and has advised the Chinese government on financial reform and macroeconomic policies.”

An archived page from Primavera’s previous website describes the Chunhua Capital Group, Primavera’s native name, as “founded by Dr. Hu Zuli, a renowned economist and financial expert. Dr. Hu previously served as a partner and chairman of Greater China at Goldman Sachs.”

Snooping on Students

Republican concerns about Primavera’s involvement with Chinese government surveillance technology appear to have some validity. The financial group appears to have a penchant for investing in companies heavily involved in surveillance tech.

According to Bloomberg, Primavera was one of eight “cornerstone investors” that committed to subscribe for $450 million in shares of Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime Group, Inc.

In December 2021, SenseTime was placed on the U.S. Treasury Department’s investment blacklist for its role in surveillance technology deployed for monitoring ethnic Uyghur populations in the Xinjiang region of Western China. As the Washington Post reported, “The Treasury Department, which oversees the investment prohibition list, said SenseTime ‘has developed facial recognition programs that can determine a target’s ethnicity, with a particular focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs,’ a persecuted Muslim minority population in China,” and “used digital surveillance technology to track Uyghurs’ movements and activities… to ‘create a police state in the Xinjiang region.’”

China’s repression of Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority group, was seen as a crime against humanity by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2022.

Another artificial intelligence company that Primavera has invested in, which has been accused of developing highly invasive surveillance technology, is Palantir. In May 2025, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was spending hundreds of millions of federal dollars to install Palantir’s Foundry operating system in multiple federal agencies to “compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give… [the president] untold surveillance power.”

According to an article in the Conversation by Nicole M. Bennett, who described herself as “a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies, and the U.S. federal government,” the Trump administration has employed another Palantir operating system called Gotham. Gotham, the article said, “is an investigative platform built for police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients” to “take whatever data an agency already has, break it down into its smallest components, and then connect the dots.”

To be clear, no one has accused Spring Education Group of snooping on students. The company’s privacy notice states, “We do not make your Personal Information available for purchase or otherwise share your information with third parties in exchange for monetary compensation.”

However, privacy advocates, parents, and teachers are expressing growing concerns about how edtech company platforms in schools collect and use student data and how that use constitutes a breach in student and educator privacy. So Primavera’s interest in both education and surveillance as hot investment properties is bound to raise questions. And any politician viewed as steering public funds to bad actors in the student privacy debate is likely to become a target for criticism.

A Workaround to Voucher Regulations

While concerns about Primavera’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party prompted conservatives to curtail the firm’s access to funds for public education, the Trump administration has opened the door to another potential pot of public money.

Included in the One Big Beautiful Bill that Trump called for, and Republican lawmakers in Congress passed in 2025, was a provision establishing the first-ever federal school voucher program, known as the Educational Choice for Children Act(ECCA). Beginning in 2027, this tax-credit program allows individuals to receive up to a $1,700 annual, dollar-for-dollar, federal tax credit for donations to state-licensed school voucher providers, called scholarship granting organizations (SGOs).

After SGOs receive donor funds, they cream some money off the top for administration and then give what’s left to families to pay for education expenses. Although formal guidelines are yet to be finalized, the law as written gives families broad leeway about what constitutes education expenses, which may include private school tuition, homeschool expenses, tutoring, transportation services, before- and after-school programs, and summer camp. Trump’s Department of Education calls this initiative “Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC).”

Florida was among the first states to opt into the voucher program, declaring, in a January 2026 announcement from the governor’s office, “The newly enacted federal Education Freedom Tax Credit is an opportunity to further support education freedom.”

Other Republican-led states joined Florida in opting into the program, and even some blue states have signed up, including Colorado and Virginia. Other states have been more skeptical of the program. In North Carolina, for instance, the state legislature voted to opt in, but the state’s democratic governor vetoed the legislation. Governors in both red and blue states in favor of adopting the program, such as outgoing Colorado Governor Jared Polis, have argued that the federal vouchers are “free money” that shouldn’t be turned down.

What’s largely been left out of the discussion is how the new federal voucher program may undermine state control over existing voucher funding. In states that have rejected voucher programs, the federal program provides another way for school choice advocates to pry open the market. Meanwhile, for states with current voucher programs that include some regulatory control, the new federal voucher program may provide a workaround for education merchants to find new inroads to public money.

“We know that not only is this a voucher scheme,” said Education Law Center’s litigation director Jessica Levin in an email, “but the aim of it is to expand vouchers nationwide, including into states that have repeatedly rejected voucher programs.”

For instance, while North Carolina’s state regulations block Spring Education Group’s private preschools from receiving public money, the federal voucher program offers a workaround because the voucher money it dispenses can be used to pay for things like after-school programs and summer camps that Spring Education Group preschools operate in the Tar Heel State.

In Texas and Florida, lawmakers who are kicking Islamic schools out of their state voucher programs over claims that the schools are linked to “terrorists” may find that opting into the federal voucher program will help these schools access public tax dollars.

Because companies that provide tutoring services, like Tutor.com, may also be allowed to receive money from the federal voucher program, conservatives who have railed against Tutor.com’s connection to Primavera Capital and the Chinese government may see even more public funds going to these enterprises via the federal program. Yet, after Arkansas Senator Cotton raised an alarm about Tutor.com, there’s no evidence on record that he has objected to his state’s decision to take part in the federal voucher program.

“Until the Treasury Department issues regulations,” said Levin, “we don’t know what leeway states will have to regulate the federal voucher program. So it doesn’t make sense for states wondering about that to opt in before the federal regulations are even proposed. However, based on the late 2025 request for comment documents from IRS/Treasury and the policies of the Trump administration regarding education privatization, it’s likely those regulations will be designed to provide little or no leeway for states to place restrictions on the SGOs that will hand out the vouchers.”

‘Free Money’ With Big Costs

State leaders and education advocates who are not spooked by public dollars for education enriching investment firms connected to the Chinese Communist Party may object to the federal voucher program for other reasons.

For instance, ECCA’s call on states to set up SGO voucher providers is expected to provide a way for private investors to reap a financial windfall from public funds meant for education.

In anticipation of the program’s rollout, investment firms are hyping the profits to be made. One firm claims, “The SGO provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act offers a powerful opportunity to expand access to independent school education”—and, no doubt, profit as a result.

A September 2025 blog post on the website of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP), a watchdog focused on the private equity industry, warned that the new federal voucher program will likely lead to greater involvement of private equity investment firms, like Primavera, in profiting from public services like education.

Because the new program allows for services like transportation, PESP senior researcher Azani Creeks explained, it will likely result in public money profiting private transportation companies like First Student, “a school bus service provider owned by private equity firm EQT.”

A report PESP published in 2022 found, “Private equity firms and the companies they own have promised to improve educational outcomes for struggling individual students and schools through new technology, personalized learning strategies, and resources for staffing and administration, but there is no conclusive data showing that school funding is better spent at private-equity owned companies than staying within the district.”

In that report, PESP pointed to a particularly egregious example in the charter school industry of private equity profiteering at the expense of public services, where a combination of for-profit operators backed by private equity has resulted in elaborate business schemes and networks of interrelated companies that hide profiteering while doing little to improve the quality of services to the public.

In a phone call with Creeks, she explained, “The point of policies like ECCA is to funnel public tax money into the private sector. But private equity investment in public services that impact the quality of people’s lives is inherently at odds with profit-making. For that reason, the new federal school voucher program needs strong guardrails.”

Public school advocates who oppose the federal voucher program have provided other reasons why state officials should not opt in. Their arguments, such as those put forward by Public Funds Public Schools, emphasize the public policy negatives of vouchers, including how they tend to have harmful impacts on funding for public schools, worsen academic outcomes of students, and fund private schools that actively discriminateagainst students, disproportionately impacting students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ students.

In Congress, Democratic Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii are planning to introduce legislation called the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act that will repeal the K-12 federal tax credit voucher program included in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

But if state officials who aren’t convinced to oppose federal school vouchers for public policy reasons, maybe the messy politics of the program will convince them that the supposed “free money” offered by the Trump administration actually comes at a very high cost.

This article was produced by Our Schools.

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