Florida Warns Schools to Not Use Online Tutoring Site Linked to CCP

A man looks at his phone near a giant image of the CCP flag on the side of a building in Beijing during the ongoing 19th Communist Party Congress, on Oct. 23, 2017. GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images

Florida’s education chief is telling public school districts across the state to not use an online tutoring service that has ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In a memo sent out on March 26, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. advised against enlisting the service of Tutor.com, a website that partners with schools, colleges, libraries, and even the U.S. military to provide on-demand tutoring and homework help for users from kindergarten to continued education.

Primavera Capital, with its headquarters located in Hong Kong, is the owner of Tutor.com. Its founder and CEO, Fred Hu, has extensive ties to the CCP organ responsible for influence operations at home and abroad.

According to an article on Primavera’s website, Mr. Hu served as a delegate for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in Hunan Province as recently as 2022. An advisory body in name, the CPPCC serves as the vehicle for CCP’s “united front” effort to keep important social groups—such as private industries, academia, religious groups, and the Chinese diaspora—loyal to the regime’s agenda.

“Ties to foreign countries of concern may compromise student data privacy, which we will never allow in Florida schools,” Mr. Diaz said in the March 26 letter to school district superintendents, charter school boards, and state college presidents. “In fact, Primavera Capital was recently investigated by the Florida Department of Education and was found to be headquartered in China.

“Let me be clear, school districts, charter schools, and state colleges should not contract with companies that have ties to foreign countries of concern and risk compromising student data.”

He also stated that those institutions are obliged to ensure compliance with Florida’s data privacy laws and regulations.

“Institutions must take the necessary steps to protect their students from nefarious foreign actors such as the Chinese Communist Party,” the letter reads.

At least one school district has cut ties with the tutoring site in the wake of the warning.

Santa Rosa County School District, which serves some 30,000 students across 41 schools, told WEAR News on March 26 that it has ended the partnership with Tutor.com.

In a statement to the ABC affiliate, the school district said that it “has suspended the use of Tutor.com as a supplemental tutoring resource for students and will be moving to a different tutoring platform after spring break.” It didn’t specify why the changes were made.

CCP Ties Draw Concerned Eyes

Primavera, a venture capital firm that has offices in Beijing, Singapore, and the United States, manages an investment portfolio consisting of mostly Chinese companies. Among the investments it banners on its website are e-commerce behemoth Alibaba; ByteDance, parent company of TikTok; and Yum China, which operates KFC and Pizza Hut stores in China.

While not evident on its portfolio web page, Primavera has expanded its investment footprint in the U.S. education market over recent years.

In 2022, Primavera acquired Tutor.com and The Princeton Review, with the latter being best known among U.S. high school students for its SAT and ACT Preparation books. It also owns Spring Education, a private school education encompassing approximately 200 schools across 19 states.

Primavera’s newly found interests in U.S. school and college classrooms has put parental rights advocates and even members of the U.S. Congress on alert.

Parents Defending Education (PDE), a grassroots organization working to expose harmful agendas in K–12 schools, warned that at least 100 school districts across the nation give students access to Tutor.com, potentially allowing the Chinese regime to collect sensitive data about U.S. students.

“I think the concerns here are much like the concerns we have seen over TikTok,” PDE founder and president Nicki Neily said in an interview with NTD earlier this month, referring to Chinese national security laws that require Chinese-owned companies to allow the Chinese regime access to confidential business and customer data.

“The American public, families, and largely school districts are not aware that this has been purchased by a Chinese-owned company,” she told NTD host Tiffany Meier. “The school districts are collecting a vast amount of information. If this application is on students’ iPads and computers, what does it have access to?”

Similar concerns were echoed in a bill introduced last week by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who are seeking to ban the Pentagon from using Tutor.com to educate servicemembers and their families.

“There is no reason the Pentagon should be paying a Chinese-owned service that collects the data of our service members and their families. There are plenty of American companies that offer tutoring services and aren’t subject to the Chinese government,” Mr. Cotton said in a statement.

Tutor.com: We Are a US Company

Tutor.com has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and emphasized that it’s a U.S. company that abides by U.S. state and federal laws.

“Tutor.com is a U.S. company, and U.S. student data stays in the U.S.,” the tutoring site said in a statement. “Primavera does not have—and may not obtain—access to our IT systems.”

According to Tutor.com, it voluntarily underwent a federal review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to ensure compliance with data protection requirements when Primavera became its new owner.

“As required by the U.S. government, Tutor.com has a designated data security officer, who has been vetted and approved by the U.S. government, to continuously monitor and ensure compliance with data-protection measures,” the company stated. “Tutor.com also has two independent directors on our board of directors—also required, vetted, and approved by the U.S. government—whose foremost duty is to ensure that personal data is appropriately safeguarded.”