The War for America's Classrooms - From Texas to You
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Mike Hixenbaugh is a Pulitzer finalist, Peabody award winner, and the author of They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms. In the book, Hixenbaugh delivers an immersive and eye-opening story of Southlake, Texas, a district that seemed to offer everything parents would want for their children—small classes, dedicated teachers, financial resources, a track record of academic success, and school spirit in abundance. All this, until a series of racist incidents became public, a plan to promote inclusiveness was proposed in response—and a coordinated, well-funded conservative backlash erupted, lighting the fire of a national movement on the verge of changing the face of public schools across the country.
They Came for the Schools pulls back the curtain on the powerful forces driving this crusade to ban books, rewrite curricula, limit rights for minority and LGBTQ students—and, most importantly, to win what Hixenbaugh’s deeply informed reporting convinces is the holy grail among those seeking to impose biblical values on American society: school privatization, one school board and one legal battle at a time.
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Recorded in a car with four high school students away from school, two Carroll ISD students are in this offensive video.
The Southlake kids are the girl seen here and the driver of the car who is not seen.
The other two teenagers are not students at Carroll ISD.
Five years ago, high school students in South Lake, Texas, part of one of the best public school systems in the country, were caught on tape saying the N-word.
The video was posted to social media and seen by millions of people.
In fact, it happened not once, but twice.
The story that we're going to hear today is not how that incident led to a racial reckoning.
A change in awareness and cultural sensitivity and understanding of the ways that minority families and students in that district have felt for years.
That's not what happened.
Instead, a right-wing Christian nationalist agenda set in the town.
It took over the school board and Southlake, Texas became an emblem of the disruption and revolution in our school systems over the last four years.
Today I speak with Mike Hixenbaugh, senior investigative reporter for NBC News, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a Peabody Award winner.
Hixenbaugh is the author of the new book, They Came for the Schools, which focuses Southlake, Texas.
One of the best public school systems in the country, and a place where everything we've seen surrounding race, microaggressions, DEI, fights over curriculum, fights over the 1619 Project, the history of the nation, and what we're going to teach our kids about the past as we move into the future, erupted into a firestorm of controversy and local civil war, pitting neighbor against neighbor, parent against parent, friend turned to enemy.
Ixenba's book provides a window into the mechanics of how one community goes from a place where people are trying to get the best education for their kids to one in which there is constant strife, allegation, and suspicion.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
*music* Joined now by Mike Hicksenbach, who is, as I just mentioned, the author of They Came for the Schools, One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and The New War for America's Classrooms.
I get to read a lot of books, Mike.
It's just a really fun part of my job.
This book is amazing, and I honestly couldn't put it down.
It feels very personal.
It feels like a window into things that all of us are talking about and afraid of and yet have not perhaps had.
Such a clear image of to date.
And so I just want to say this is this is a really a must read for anyone who's concerned about the country and our schools.
Thank you.
It's also a personal story for you.
You're this is not one of those moments where a reporter from a big outlet got on a plane from his cool apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and made his way to Texas for the first time.
So before we talk about the book and the school district you cover in the book, can you tell us how this This really starts with a personal kind of set of issues with your family.
First of all, thank you.
I love the podcast and I appreciate everything you just said.
I wrote the book because I think a lot of people are experiencing in their communities these types of fights around belonging and race and LGBTQ inclusion and religion and its role in education.
And I think a lot of people are experiencing that alone and not really sure how that fits into this bigger picture.
So I wanted them to Connect all the dots and to also see how their story fits into this bigger narrative.
And so the way I came to this was I was living in a suburb outside of Houston in 2020, raising four kids, living there with my wife.
And I was noticing something.
It was summer of 2020.
And for anyone who remembers 2020, if you if you've not managed to suppress those thoughts, those memories, we were in the midst of the pandemic and kind of the fight over pandemic restrictions and safety measures and then the growing national backlash against the protest for racial justice following George Floyd's murder.
And in my suburb, I remember very clearly, I was heading to bed, my wife handed me her phone and said, look at this.
And she had open our neighborhood Facebook page.
The place, if you live in the suburbs or have an HOA, you know this page.
This is the page where you write when you've lost a pet or you found a pet or where, you know, you post the updates, the trash pickup schedule.
But on this night, a neighbor was writing to warn that he thought he saw members of Antifa
buying stocking up on ammo at a nearby sporting goods store and that he suspected this was a sign that our neighborhood Timberlake Estates which didn't even have is a suburb but didn't even have sidewalks that Antifa was gonna be coming to our neighborhood and shooting up the place or trying to raise hell and another neighbor chimed in like you know maybe the shooting is gonna happen on the July on July 4th under the cover of fireworks and then
The original poster followed up to say, like, well, here's a statute that says you have the right to run over protesters if they surround your car in the neighborhood.
And I remember going looking at my wife and saying, what the hell is this?
This is not.
What?
And that reflected a kind of a viral conspiracy theory that year that that Trump was helping push that the idea that Democrats and Antifa and Black Lives Matter were on a mission to destroy suburbia or abolish the suburbs was the line Trump kept using.
And so I just I was like, this is this is interesting.
And my wife, who's a black biracial woman, was actually having a very kind of emotional reaction to all this stuff.
And so I was like, you know, I'm going to I'm going to I think this is a story.
And the story in my mind was the ways in which suburbs, which used to be white.
It's a very American tale.
It used to be predominantly white, white by design in many cases.
And so I was like, I'm going to tell that story.
had grown much more diverse in the last 20 or 30 years.
There had been simmering tensions around those issues that were exploding to the forefront in the era of Trump.
And so I was like, I'm gonna tell that story.
And in the midst of reporting it, I realized that this fight in the suburbs was really shifting, and it ended up being a fight over suburban education and public schools And then later, even more broadly, just what is public education?
What is the story we teach the next generation about America?
Who is welcome?
And which ideas are welcome?
And so it became a much, much bigger story than I originally thought I was writing.
Yeah, and tell us about South Lake, Texas.
This is the school district and the city or town that you really focus on in the book.
It's really an amazing kind of place in terms of its educational system, its reputation in the state and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
I will be honest, I grew up in the suburbs.
I grew up in one of those suburbs that used to be white, and even as a biracial Asian kid, a lot of times, You know, we were some of the very few kids of color, even though we were white passing.
I thought my school district was pretty.
Of parents really, uh, concerned with the quote unquote best education for their kids and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But reading this book, I realized Southlake is like 10 degrees, way beyond anything I've ever experienced.
So tell us about Southlake.
Yeah, so Southlake, if you live in the suburbs or in a metro area, you have a version of Southlake where you grew up.
And it's like where your rich friend lives.
It's the neighborhood that everyone loves to hate.
Uh, and it, or if you live there, you just, you love that everyone loves to hate it because it's, they're good at everything.
They dominate in sports.
They have the best test scores.
You can't afford a house in Southlake.
And if you can, then you feel pretty good about that fact.
And so the community is elite, and people flock to it.
People who could afford to get a house in Southlake flock there for the school system.
Because, you know, as some parents put it, it's a private school education at a public school price.
And that really defined the town.
It's a place that was also wealthy by design in the sense that in the 60s and 70s, the town set up zoning rules to really ban any kind of affordable housing or multifamily housing or apartments or even houses on less than a quarter acre.
And so you had to have a certain size lot, certain size house.
And it was a way of making this a very elite community and therefore the schools very elite because they're funded by those tax dollars and, you know, it makes it easier for the teachers if every kid's coming from a high-end household.
And that's the story of Southlake.
Until in 2018, when in the midst of the Trump era, at a time when America was beginning to grapple with some of our less appealing aspects of our history around race and racism, some white students in Southlake, some high school kids, filmed themselves chanting the N-word at a homecoming afterparty.
Posted a video of this onto social media and it went viral.
And triggered what was really kind of a mini racial reckoning in this community.
And it wasn't the video that triggered it though really.
The video was just the thing that lit the match.
What it did was it prompted parents, black parents, parents of black kids and other minority students to come forward and say, this thing with the n-word is not just about a video.
My kid has been dealing with just stupid stuff the entire time we've lived here.
And some of it seems subtle.
Some of it was more explicit.
On the subtle end, it's, you know, white kids walking up to a black girl and playing with her hair and saying, why does it feel like that?
It's so fun to touch.
On the more extreme end, it's kids saying jokes that went like, how do you get a black out of a tree?
you cut the rope to just kind of casual use of the N-word by white kids in the hallways.
And that was, those stories poured forward like a dam headburst.
And it triggered the mostly conservative white leaders of this town to say, we can do better.
We're going to come up with a plan to address this.
And again, this is 2018 to 2020.
It just so happened that they released their plan, what became known as the Cultural Competence Action Plan, this diversity plan.
They released it in 2020, around the same time that my neighbors were warning about Antifa coming to shoot the suburbs.
And so the folks in Southlake were seeing those same warnings and stories.
And for some folks, this, it became, this was the answer.
It...
For them, this was what Trump meant when he said the Democrats were going to destroy the suburbs.
They were coming in to the school.
The left was coming with this woke DEI plan and they were going to teach every white kid that they should be ashamed of themselves and every black kid that they're inherently a victim.
And this kind of crazy caricature of the plan came forward and it was really the beginning of the nationwide backlash against what we were calling critical race theory in 2021.
So if we back up and we have these videos that go viral of white kids saying the N-word, and then, as you say, this reckoning of dozens of students, students who are black, students who are South Asian, students who are Jewish, students who are queer in some cases, coming forward to say, here's what's happened to me.
And when you read those pages, You you think, well, there's just reasonable responses here, like the school can do more to teach students about the histories of these words.
You can put things in the curriculum that really help people understand this.
I mean, there's there's some basic things that can be done.
And lo and behold, the principal and leaders in the school district are pretty much like, that's what we should do.
That makes sense.
They put together this committee.
And if we really stop the story from like December 2018, I would think that it would have ended with this school district rolled out some plans, some different components from kindergarten to 12th grade to like help students understand race and dehumanization history.
And it would have been pretty just reasonable.
And as you said, most of the parents who were involved in this committee are like Republicans.
They're conservative and they're they're not people who are political radicals.
One thing that becomes very clear, though, when you get to 2020 is what you've already alluded to, which is the national.
Completely infringes on the local and things happen around the country that change the climate in South Lake.
And it's one of those moments when you realize it's.
We live in a time when local politics is national politics and national politics is local politics, so I'm sure everybody can imagine it, but would you just take us through 2020 that the year all of us would hope to forget and explain why?
The backlash you mentioned happens really ignited by national events.
The conservative movement in 2020 and into 2021 really was reacting to changes in the culture.
And so some of those changes were what we were seeing as a result of the protests for racial justice after George Floyd's murder.
Some of it was reacting to the release of the 1619 Project and books like Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist that were getting a lot of attention that year.
And that sought to reframe how a lot of white folks in this country see America and see its origin story.
And I know that was a big change.
I grew up in a nearly all-white town.
I learned kind of a whitewashed version.
We didn't dwell on slavery as like a foundational aspect to America's history in my social studies classes.
And like a lot of people, I had never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I didn't really fully comprehend that, you know, the horrors of Jim Crow and what that meant, you know, up until the civil rights movement.
I had a very sanitized version of that.
And so the culture was changing in 2018, 2019, 2020.
And those conversations were moving into schools.
And so, and largely they were being welcomed in a lot of places, including like Southlake, But it became the narrative on Fox News and elsewhere that these protests were a part of a movement to change America, this radical left-wing Marxist agenda.
And then it became some of the old buzzwords, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Christian.
And so the plan in Southlake became part of that, became viewed as a vehicle for all of that.
And although the plan doesn't mention critical race theory or systemic racism or, you know, any of those things, it became the scene in town is like, oh, this wasn't just a plan that some community members put together in response to racist incidents.
In fact, the debate became, from the right, those racist incidents were actually all exaggerated.
Those parents are part of an agenda.
The school board is part of this far-left project.
And we have to defeat this plan and save our school in order to save the country.
After Southlake rallied, Southlake Conservatives formed this group called Southlake Families PAC.
More than $200,000 to support candidates in a local election, and really kind of, in the spring of 2021, created a new model that we would soon see copied all over the country.
And it was around that same time that Steve Bannon went on his War Room podcast TV show and declared, the path to saving America runs through the school boards.
And it was those two things, the local and the national, You know, the local folks were seeing it as their mission to save the country by doing their part at the local level.
And then national leaders in the far right and the GOP saw local as a chance to win back disaffected suburban white voters who didn't like Trump so much, but maybe we can get them by telling them that we're going to fight CRT and that progressives like Joe Biden are trying to teach your white kid to hate himself.
And those two things became Like, you could not separate local politics from national politics in these communities moving forward.
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When I think about those parents on that committee who were putting together a plan to help the school district really kind of reckon with these racist incidents and histories, I think of the parents as people who've been in the community for decades.
They moved there in 2002, 2005.
They've raised children here.
Some of them are white.
Some of them are black.
Some of them are people of color.
And they're just, like, volunteering, really, for, like, almost two years to write an action plan.
And one of the things that struck me in the book was they go from that dad you knew because your kid played on the same football team with him, or that mom used to know because you volunteered in the same classroom together in fifth grade for your kids, to these are political enemies who hate America and hate God and want to destroy our country.
Would you mind just, you know, taking us through that as the person who reported all this on the ground?
Because even in my jaded, Do this everyday self.
I just was turning those pages, just watching the transformation before my eyes and being appalled at like, that's, that's a guy you've known 20 years.
Like you see him when you get a muffin in the morning.
He's not Antifa Marxist.
That's Daryl.
Like what's wrong with you?
But it happened nonetheless.
Yeah, I think the narrative became that those folks who are now pushing the quote-unquote Marxist agenda, that they had been captured by this just woke, Elon Musk would call it the woke mind virus.
And so the folks on the right would say, we didn't change, they changed.
And the story that comes to mind that illustrates this most viscerally is the school board president during this period in Southlake was a woman named Michelle Moore.
And she's a lifelong Republican, like, you know, had GOP voting record through and through.
Her husband's very conservative.
Her husband had actually founded the company Patriot Mobile, which some of your listeners may have heard of this Christian conservative cell phone company that really in recent years has gone to war to try to attack school board members.
In an ironic twist, they would end up going after this woman, Michelle Moore, whose, again, husband helped create the company.
These are conservative Republican folks.
She, in her role as the school board president, heard the stories from black parents, parents of LGBTQ kids, parents of Asian American kids.
Parents of Muslim kids who all came forward with stories of just being harassed, teased, othered in sometimes vulgar ways in the school district.
And she said, as part of her moral compass, I need to address this.
The community needs to address this.
We should come up with a plan.
So she became a supporter of finding a way to make changes.
And after the plan was released and kind of became viewed as instead like this Marxist attack on the school district, Michelle Moore, this conservative school board president, then was labeled as this far-left activist who was working to remake the schools as part of this really radical Marxist agenda.
And it affected her personally.
It wasn't just strangers coming to board members saying this.
There was one person who was a very close family friend who she had had Thanksgiving dinner with the year before, leading the charge against her and against this plan and making some really extreme allegations.
And so I don't know how you reconcile that, how you reach the conclusion.
It's one thing to say, I disagree with your approach to trying to address these issues, or maybe we don't need to hire a DEI consultant or whatever, but the idea that, oh, I don't just disagree with you on how to address this, it became, there's no problem, those stories are lies, and you're part of a radical movement trying to destroy our community.
And that affected the school board president that I mentioned, Michelle Moore.
Her health suffered.
She lost sleep.
She lost weight.
She wasn't eating.
And this is an unpaid volunteer elected position.
That's what school board positions typically are.
There's no money in it.
There's usually no further office that you're building toward.
It's just a way of serving the community.
And she was turned into this caricature of this left-wing villain.
And it devastated her relationships.
You already alluded to this, but in some way, Southlake became a place where a playbook could be copied.
And so when we get to 21, 22, those years, we see the overwhelming success of the conservative movement, the anti-CRT movement, whatever we want to call it in Southlake.
Leading to victories on the school board, leading to victories in getting people like Michelle Moore to say, I think I don't want to do this anymore.
Getting victories all over town.
What was that playbook and how did it travel well beyond Southlake?
Yeah, so again, that group I mentioned, Southlake Families PAC, their strategy was really to raise money to back a slate of conservative, hardline conservative candidates.
To clear the field of any other conservative candidates.
And they did that by doing screening interviews with all their candidates and making anyone who wanted to run for school board in Southlake as a conservative agree that if the PAF didn't pick them, that they wouldn't run.
That way there was no vote splitting.
And then they, yeah, they took the $250,000 they raised and they sent out mailers to everyone in the community, painting their opponents as radical Marxists, far-left people who are trying to teach white kids to hate themselves.
And they even printed out these kind of, these political mailers that were designed to look like a newspaper, these eight-page newspapers that You know, you told the story of what was happening in the school district in these radical terms that the far left was trying to take over the school with this radical CCAP plan, and they're going to criminalize white children for having opinions.
And they put those in every mailbox in the city.
And they did well.
They won those elections in a landslide in May of 2021.
And what really turned it into a national model, though, is what happened after Southlake.
Had this huge, you know, this school board election where the anti-DEI candidates dominated.
I had been reporting it for NBC News with a colleague named Antonia Hilton, and I don't know if it was because of our coverage or if someone else tipped them off, but the conservative media in America Went wild for this story.
The election triumph in Southlake, Texas was the lead story on Laura Ingraham's Fox News primetime program.
I don't think a local school board election has ever led a Fox primetime program, but in this story, it was like months after Trump had lost in 2020.
And for them, it was like, here's a hope.
You know, our side has, here's a path to victory for our side.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board ran a headline, Southlake says no to woke indoctrination.
The Federalist ran this article saying what happened in Southlake that weekend was like the beginning of a new Tea Party movement focused on retaking schools.
And again, Steve Bannon soon after that came out and declared that the path to saving America runs through the school boards.
What the Southlake playbook ended up being copied very literally copied and pasted into communities all over the country.
In some cases like in outside of Nashville in Williamson County another affluent suburb there was a Williamson families pack with like the same mission statement and they followed that strategy.
Play by play, there was a Francis Howell families pack in the suburbs outside of St.
Louis, a Lake Travis families pack outside of Austin, a Spring Branch families, you know, there was all of these copycat groups.
And the strategy really, when you boil it down, it was to take national politics, apply it to our local election, take these nonpartisan races, make them partisan and get really conservative, almost MAGA aligned Republicans onto the school boards.
I saw this happen in my school district that I went K-12 in Southern California.
I saw people I went to school with and graduated high school with running for school board on the kind of platform I read about in your book.
And the playbook, I think, is one that many of us have seen work all over the country, whether it came right from Southlake or whether it was a copy of a copy of a copy.
This really did go viral.
One of the things I just could not get away from reading this book is the number of parents who say to teachers, to administrators, to whoever will listen at the school, my kid came home and asked me about why a police officer would be interested in hurting somebody who is of a different color.
My kid came home and asked what a minority is.
And there's a woman in the book who says, my kid doesn't know what a minority is, and I'm not ready to have that conversation.
So I'm mad at you, the schools, for wanting to do that.
There's another dad who says that he asked his kids who are eight and nine about the n-word and they said they didn't know what that was.
So he said, the only people teaching my kids the n-word are the teachers and the superintendent and everybody else.
Here's my point, Mike, is I know this intellectually.
I've talked about it so many times on the show, but again, it just hit me in the face in a fresh way here.
Part of this backlash is parents literally saying out loud, my kid wants to know what a minority is and I don't want to have that conversation.
So I'm going to go raise hell at a school board meeting rather than having a talk with them about a minority or police brutality or the history of slavery.
It's just.
In almost every chapter.
I mean, it's yeah, it's a great observation.
And I think what's what's interesting, though, is there it's one thing for a parent to have that feeling.
And it does.
It did come up a lot.
My kid doesn't know what the N word is, but you are going to teach it.
My kid doesn't even know what the word minority means, but you are going to teach it to him.
Or, yeah, my kids have never heard the N word.
And the counter, of course, from black parents is, yeah, I don't have that luxury.
I've had to had I had to explain that to my kid because he heard it.
Someone said it to him.
But that resistance to like, yeah, I think what you're seeing is kind of an impulse to keep kids innocent.
That's like a very strong in the, I think, conservative Christian culture, preserve kids innocence, withhold that knowledge from them until a certain age.
Even if you take that as like a good faith position that they have, the solution that they propose isn't to shield their own kid from that knowledge, it's to shield all kids from that knowledge.
To remove all references from schools, remove all picture books that show two dads holding hands from the schools.
And yeah, I think that's a recurring theme, is like this parents' rights movement.
You know, so-called parents' rights movement that they branded themselves as the parents' rights movement.
You see over and over again that their policy proposals really aim to limit the rights of other parents, to basically take their preferred worldview and make it dominant and suppress others.
And so that's a recurring theme in Southlake and all over the country and just in politics generally, I think.
Well, this is the district that people are going to, this is going to jog their memory, but this is the district where one of the curriculum heads told teachers, when you teach the Holocaust, you can only do that if you teach both sides.
And one of the teachers is like, how do you teach both sides of the Holocaust?
And there's sort of just befuddlement all around, but everybody in the room is basically understanding That doesn't make sense.
And yet, if we don't do this, we're going to have a hundred parents at our throats tomorrow for whatever we've taught.
And anyway, I just, I remember talking about that very story on this show.
Like, how do you teach two sides of the Holocaust?
We talked about it for like half an hour.
And what was really happening in that incident was the administrator was in this air of backlash in fear of parent But also, by then, we were seeing some of this stuff codified in state laws.
So Texas had passed a law, what they dubbed their anti-critical race theory law, even though they didn't mention CRT, that basically said that if you're going to teach about, or have books, or if you're going to teach about divisive subject or currently controversial subject was the language, then you have to show all perspectives.
And so this I think well-meaning, actually, school administrator was like, who I think probably had heard fringe complaints about kids learning about the Holocaust in years past, connected those things and thought, well, if you're gonna have a book on your shelf about the Holocaust, make sure you have one that shows the other perspective.
And something I reveal in the book, you know, that was big.
When my colleague Antonia and I published that story, it was big national news and kind of a symbol of the overreach of of this movement early on, but the update in the book is, well, we were able to tell that story only because six South Lake teachers came to us and shared what was happening on the condition we not name them.
Two of them went on NBC Nightly News for us, and we masked their identities by Filming them in silhouette and applying this digital distortion to their voices so you can recognize their voices.
One of those teachers, I can now share her name is Christina McGurk, fourth grade teacher, was in the room and appalled by this Holocaust instruction and just by the policies generally in the district that she decided to speak to us and what happened is somebody, somewhere, Through some sophisticated technology, unmasked her voice, undid the digital distortion that we applied to it and the other teachers who had given interviews.
And they were able to connect her voice to some public comments she'd given at a school board meeting.
And she got run out of the school district as a result of this.
The one person who was disciplined in that whole controversy was the teacher who tried to speak up about why we shouldn't both sides the Holocaust.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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Here's Mike talking about where you can find him and keep up with his work.
So it's called They Came for the Schools, One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity and The New War for America's Classrooms.
It's out now.
You're Mike Hickson Ball.
What is the best way to kind of track your work?
Obviously, at NBC is an easy place, but if you're doing events or have other things going, where can people?
I've been trying to update my travel and book events at MikeHicksonBall.com.
Perfect.
As always, friends, thanks for listening.
Thank you for all of your support.
We'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the Weekly Roundup.
