Who Gets to Shape Texas Children?

Yesterday I stood alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in Austin as he announced a sweeping effort to keep hostile foreign influence out of Texas classrooms. The governor called for legislation prohibiting public schools from accepting foreign money or partnering with foreign governments, and proposed barring H-1B workers from those schools. His message was clear: Hostile foreign influence has no place in our classrooms.

I applaud him for confronting a threat that has long operated in plain sight.

Hostile foreign actors are using soft power to gain influence over American education. They provide money, curriculum, teacher training, and cultural programs. When the organizations behind those efforts maintain extremist ties or advance narratives hostile to American principles, it is indoctrination.

I know what ideological influence in education looks like because I experienced it firsthand. One of the most alarming aspects of the aftermath of the October 7 attacks was how immediately parts of the American radical Left cast Palestinians as the primary victims. That framing spread rapidly through media, universities, and education institutions.

I encountered it while completing my teacher-education program in California. In a program deigned to prepare future American teachers, we spent class time reflecting on the “oppression” of Palestinians.

One country emerged as a focal point with this propaganda: Qatar.

Qatar has invested heavily in cultivating influence in the Texas through its education arm, Qatar Foundation International, or QFI. In Texas, QFI has provided grants to school districts, funded teachers and instructional materials, supported curriculum development, and helped train educators. In Austin Independent School District alone, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies found that QFI supplied more than $462,000 between 2016 and 2022 for the district’s Arabic Language and Culture program. That money paid for instructors, curriculum, materials, and related support. QFI has also funded programs in Houston, including the Arabic Immersion Magnet School, and supported work involving the University of Texas at Austin and Pflugerville ISD.

There is nothing inherently wrong with learning Arabic or studying another culture. Foreign-language education can be valuable. But there is a profound difference between learning about another civilization and allowing a foreign organization to shape how that civilization is presented to American children.

When FDD obtained the records, the materials went far beyond vocabulary and grammar. They included textbooks and workbooks from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, and Qatar. One Saudi textbook advanced the idea that Zionists manipulate people in the West. Other materials featured maps labeling Israel as “Palestine.” A Qatar-produced second-grade curriculum taught vocabulary such as “Allah” and “emir,” described its lessons as compatible with “Qatari values and the Arab and Islamic culture,” and assigned students to create greeting cards praising the Prophet Muhammad with images of the Kaaba.

QFI-linked initiatives have also included lessons asking students to question the definition of terrorism and consider scenarios involving Israeli soldiers and Palestinian refugee camps.

This is a soft power play.

In Austin, the volume of Arabic-language material from outside the United States was so extensive that administrators claimed they needed a $50,000 translator before releasing the files, supposedly to check for student information.

Higher education has required reporting of certain foreign gifts and contracts. But K–12 schools have no comparable transparency requirement. As Texas state Sen. Paul Bettencourt famously states, “What gets measured gets fixed.” Because there are no laws in place that require transparency from this front, it is nearly impossible to know the full extent of foreign influence in our kids’ classrooms.

America is a creedal nation. We are not united by blood and soil, but by shared principles. When radical extremist actors seek to destroy those principles through soft power, we must expose it and end it.

Gov. Abbott is right to act. There is no circumstance under which radical extremist ideologies should be indoctrinating Texas children. If America is a creedal nation, our schools must remain anchored to the creed that makes America possible.

Foreign governments should not decide what that creed means, and they certainly should not decide what our children learn.