College Entrance Exam Company To Sever Ties With Confucius Institutes

US media is report­ing that the orga­ni­za­tion respon­si­ble for devel­op­ing the US col­lege entrance exams will sev­er its finan­cial ties with the Chi­nese Con­fu­cius Insti­tute Head­quar­ters. Accord­ing to a report by The Cen­ter Square:

Novem­ber 2, 2020 Col­lege Board, the enti­ty respon­si­ble for devel­op­ing SAT and AP tests, will sev­er finan­cial ties with the Chi­nese Con­fu­cius Insti­tute Head­quar­ters (Han­ban) at the end of the year. U.S. Sen. Mar­sha Black­burn, R‑Tennessee, and six oth­er U.S. sen­a­tors sent a let­ter to Col­lege Board CEO David Cole­man last week, ask­ing for clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the board’s finan­cial rela­tion­ship with Han­ban and the extent of Chi­nese gov­ern­ment influ­ence on test devel­op­ment and guest teacher place­ments in the U.S. Col­lege Board has received an annu­al grant from Han­ban since 2006 to sup­port teach­ing and learn­ing of Chi­nese lan­guage and cul­ture in U.S. schools, Col­lege Board Senior Vice Pres­i­dent Elis­sa Kim said in response the sen­a­tors’ let­ter. Col­lege Board no longer will pur­sue grant fund­ing from the Chi­nese, Kim said. “2020 is the final year in which the Col­lege Board will receive or pur­sue any grant fund­ing from Han­ban,” Kim wrote. Kim said the board worked with Han­ban to build school dis­tricts’ Chi­nese lan­guage pro­grams, but as pro­grams are becom­ing more estab­lished, the board’s work with Han­ban has reduced in scope.

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The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed last week that a group of US Sen­a­tors had asked Col­lege Board to clar­i­fy its finan­cial rela­tion­ship with the Chi­nese Con­fu­cius Insti­tute Headquarters.

Con­fu­cian Insti­tutes are pub­lic edu­ca­tion­al part­ner­ships between col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in Chi­na and col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in oth­er coun­tries. In 2019, Inside High­er Ed described Con­fu­cian Insti­tutes as fol­lows:  

The Con­fu­cius Insti­tutes have long been con­tro­ver­sial. The cen­ters vary some­what across dif­fer­ent cam­pus­es, but they typ­i­cal­ly offer some com­bi­na­tion of Man­darin lan­guage class­es, cul­tur­al pro­gram­ming and out­reach to K‑12 schools and the com­mu­ni­ty more broad­ly. They are staffed in part with vis­it­ing teach­ers from Chi­na and fund­ed by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, with match­ing resources pro­vid­ed by the host insti­tu­tion. The num­ber of U.S. uni­ver­si­ties host­ing the insti­tutes increased rapid­ly after the first was estab­lished at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land Col­lege Park in 2004, grow­ing to more than 90 at the peak.

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For more on the Con­fu­cius Insti­tutes, go here.