There are also signs of a new approach to influencing elementary and high schools: just buy them.

  This is where the Spring Education Group, a for-profit company buying up private schools across the United States, comes into the picture. Primavera Holdings in Hong Kong owns the Spring Education Group and previously owned the Princeton Review and Tutor.com. Primavera also has associations with ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

  Primavera Holdings made a rare appearance in the headlines when it purchased Tutor.com, which contracts with the U.S. military and many schools across the country to provide test prep and homework help.

  In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in 2024, Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) wrote, “While providing educational services, Tutor.com collects personal data on users, such as location, internet protocol addresses, and contents of the tutoring sessions. As Chinese national security laws require companies to release confidential business and customer data to the Chinese government, we are paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.” Tutor.com denied that any students’ data would be shared with China, and today the Tutor.com website says that it is “U.S.-owned and operated” (How and if Primavera sold or divested from Tutor.com remains unclear).