Byline: By Maddie · Investigations
Curriculum decisions are usually presented as the product of neutral expert panels: educators, historians, and subject-matter specialists convened to recommend what students should learn. What’s less often disclosed is who funds the foundations that convene those panels in the first place — and what those funders have historically wanted removed or added to the record.
We pulled the public tax filings for a dozen foundations active in curriculum advising over the past decade. Most of the funding is unremarkable: philanthropic money going where philanthropic money usually goes. But a smaller number of foundations show a consistent pattern — funding curriculum panels in multiple states, each panel nominally independent of the others, each arriving at strikingly similar recommendations about which topics need “more context” and which need less.
None of the individual grants look unusual on their own. It’s only when you map them against each other — same donor, different state, same recommended edit — that a coordinated pattern becomes visible. This is, by design, hard to prove and easy to deny: every foundation can accurately say it operates independently, because on paper, it does.
We’re not alleging anything illegal here. Funding a curriculum panel is legal, disclosed (eventually, in filings most people never read), and defensible as an exercise of free speech. What we’re doing is simply following the public paper trail to its source, so that the next time a “grassroots, independent” curriculum recommendation shows up in your local district, you can check whether it’s actually independent — or whether it’s one node in a much larger, well-funded, and entirely legal network.
We’ll keep updating this piece as more filings become public. If you’ve seen a curriculum recommendation in your district that seemed to arrive from nowhere, let us know — there’s usually a filing somewhere that explains where it actually came from.
