The Tax Foundation’s TaxEDU curriculum teaches students that corporate tax cuts help workers. With backing from the Koch network and big oil, the right-wing nonprofit is implanting this agenda in public schools.
A teacher passes out a mock calculus test during a class at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics on Thursday, May 2, 2019. (Derek Davis / Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
When students head back to school in the fall, some will get an unusual crash course in taxes and personal finance. In class lessons and explainer videos, they’ll be taught that workers are the ones “who bear the burden” of corporate income taxes, and that when big companies dodge taxes, it helps “protect employment and job creation.”
Through a new curriculum project called TaxEDU, corporations are pushing these pro-business messages in hundreds of high school and college classrooms across the country. The effort is being led by the Tax Foundation, a right-wing tax policy nonprofit that also helped shape Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page plan for a second Donald Trump presidency to dismantle the federal government.
As states have considered new policies like “mansion taxes” to levy on the wealthy and the IRS is beefing up its infrastructure and enforcement, TaxEDU has been expanding its reach, instructing more and more students that the last thing they want to do is make sure the rich and powerful pay their fair share.
The Tax Foundation is leading the effort, using backing from major corporate interests, including the billionaire-backed Koch network and other fossil fuel lobbying groups, to push for a corporate-friendly tax system.
The foundation’s influence is also evident in the pages of Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for a potential second Trump presidency that is being spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Project 2025’s section on tax policy, which cites the Tax Foundation several times, adopts policy positions that overlap significantly with TaxEDU’s framing and content.
Project 2025 proposes slashing marginal tax rates, a system that taxes high-income earners at a higher rate than low-income workers, citing the Tax Foundation’s analysis on the matter. In turn, TaxEDU instructs students that higher marginal tax rates leave workers “discouraged to work additional hours and earn higher incomes.”
And Project 2025, again citing the Tax Foundation’s analysis, advocates for the US tax code to be “simplified” — by effectively gutting corporate taxes like those on foreign income to US-controlled companies. The proposal is a common refrain in TaxEDU’s materials. “It pays to keep it simple,” one video tells listeners.
In June, more than seventy tax policy professors signed a letter warning that the suite of TaxEDU educational materials created by the Tax Foundation to provide “teachers the tools to make students better citizens” was “not fit for use” by educators, given its clear bias toward corporate interests.
“As it is now, the Tax Foundation materials are completely inappropriate,” Howard Chernick, professor emeritus of economics at the City University of New York and one of the letter’s signatories, told us.
“This isn’t education, this is propaganda,” he said.
In one educational video, the group claims that “economists agree” that “the corporate income tax is one of the most harmful and least efficient ways to fund our priorities.” Another video threatens that “you and the economy suffer” if companies are forced to pay taxes on their profits.
Some of these “explainer” videos have been viewed more than 300,000 times since they were posted in 2022 and 2023. And according to the Tax Foundation’s most recent annual report, the TaxEDU website has received more than three million views since 2021.
In a statement, the Tax Foundation defended the materials, saying that they “derive directly from Tax Foundation’s deeper research, which is widely respected and regularly cited among academics, journalists, and policymakers.”
“Our aim with TaxEDU is to fill a knowledge that others have not,” wrote Jesse Solis, a spokesperson for the organization, adding that “TaxEDU is not the only or final word on tax education.”
The Washington, DC–based Tax Foundation has been a forceful opponent of wealth taxes, including in Chicago, and in its three-year strategic plan, the organization promised it was “inoculating people against progressive rhetoric and misleading talking points” on tax issues.
Yet a recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit that focuses on taxation and wealth inequality, found that mansion taxes “improve tax fairness” and can serve as an important new source of revenue to improve housing affordability.
The TaxEDU materials as a whole — which the Tax Foundation says were used in 1,500 classrooms across the country in 2023 — are just one example of how corporate interests, from big oil to the beef industry, are managing to infiltrate the classroom.
But the Tax Foundation’s materials appear to prey in particular on the well-documented gap in youth education on taxes and personal finance, subjects often absent from the classroom.
There’s a “real need” for quality educational materials on these topics, said Darien Shanske, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law who focuses on taxation and the organizer of the letter denouncing TaxEDU.
“These materials are meant to be picked up, ready to use, by teachers who themselves are not going to be sophisticated in tax matters,” Shanske told us. For that reason, he said, “Our letter is meant to get a warning out there.”
Making Tax Avoidance “Sticky”
The Tax Foundation presents itself outwardly as a straightforward research hub on tax issues, labeling itself as “nonpartisan” and staffed by “trusted experts.” Since it was founded in 1937, the group has become a go-to source on tax policy in the media. According to its annual report, the Tax Foundation receives a quarter of all media citations on tax policy issues — more than any other organization.
“They’re very influential,” Chernick said of the organization. “They’re very good at getting their ideas out into the public.”
Despite its veneer of neutrality, the Tax Foundation clearly favors the corporate interests that provide much of its funding.
“They’re very pro-business,” said Robert Lynch, professor emeritus of economics at Washington College. The effect of their core policy goals, he said, would be to “shift the tax burden away from the wealthiest and onto the middle class and the poor.”
The group advocates for slashing taxes on investors’ capital gains, replacing the corporate income tax with a lower flat tax, and repealing all estate taxes and taxes on companies buying back their own stocks to benefit stockholders.
“We’ve set a long-term goal of eliminating at least five state inheritance and estate taxes,” the foundation said in its strategic plan.
Sponsors of the organization’s annual “Tax Prom” gala — a 650-person dinner where Fortune 500 executives mingle with lobbyists and lawmakers — include some of the country’s most powerful corporations, like oil giant ExxonMobil and banking behemoth JPMorgan, in addition to lobbying groups representing big business like the American Bankers Association and the US Chamber of Commerce.
The organization has received funding from the fossil fuel lobby, the conservative dark-money group the 45 Committee, a lobbying group representing major CEOs, a big tech–funded legal organization, and the powerful right-wing network founded by petrochemical titans Charles and David Koch.
“A big part of their money comes from big corporations that have profited handsomely from tax avoidance,” Chernick said.
The Tax Foundation has, for instance, been outspoken on the “unintended fiscal consequences” of soda taxes, which it deems “misguided” — all while PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company serve as some of its biggest sponsors. Senior executives at PepsiCo have in the past served on the Tax Foundation’s board of directors.
The Tax Foundation’s foray into K–12 education is relatively new. The organization launched TaxEDU in 2020, and the platform has since become a core part of the organization’s engagement strategy, according to its strategic plan. “[TaxEDU’s videos] enrich our educational efforts by making ideas approachable and ‘sticky,’ and, when done right, can shift the narrative,” the plan says.
The curriculum includes ready-made lesson plans for classroom teachers and “primers” that provide basic information on tax issues.
Shanske, who reviewed the materials, found some of the materials valuable, but on the whole, he said they “certainly present just one side of issues.”
One true-or-false question asks whether individual income taxes “have a negative effect on the economy.” The answer? “True.”
Lynch called this “a nonsense question and answer.” “Whether [income taxes] are good or bad for the economy depends entirely on the purpose that they’re raised for, and how they’re spent,” he said.
Regardless of the criticisms, it’s clear the Tax Foundation has been successful in getting its tax policy curriculum in front of students.
The Tax Foundation has presented its materials to educators at conferences across the country, from Mississippi to Nevada. This past spring, a New York nonprofit that provides after-school education to impoverished youth used the materials in its classes. A community college in California includes TaxEDU among its resources for students.
As the Tax Foundation told donors in its 2023 annual report, “TaxEDU is educating the next generation of taxpayers.”
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.