How Public Schools Became Ground Zero for America’s Culture Wars

Reporter: Federal dollars could dry up for schools that don’t ditch diversity programs … …that don’t commit to dropping DEI programs within 10 days. Immediate halt of any practice that factors in race. From admissions to financial aid to hiring. Al Letson: Banned books, purged websites, public schools forced to sign anti DEI pledges, and billions of federal research dollars ripped from universities. Trump’s attack on DEI is coming in hot and fast. But it’s no surprise if you’ve been paying attention to the battles in local school boards across America’s suburbs. Mike Hixenbaugh: I’ve never felt that feeling before, where it was like, oh, they’re targeting us, my people, my wife, my kids, me, and it’s about race. The ugliness of our national politics was really playing out at the most visceral level in these suburbs. Al Letson: Coming up, NBC investigative reporter Mike Hixenbaugh on how the national culture war over how your kids are taught ended up ripping up his town and his front lawn, literally. Stay with us. This is More to the Story. I’m Al Letson. The Trump administration’s war on DEI is rippling through agencies, nonprofits, corporate America and school systems, but this fight over diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t start in the Oval Office and it didn’t just start this year. School boards and education have been on the front lines of the culture war since before Brown v. Board of Education. This purge of DEI is just the newest battle. Mike Hixenbaugh is a senior investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s won awards for reporting on race, gender, and sexuality, but that’s come at a personal cost too. We’ll get into that. And talk about the book he published last year. 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 set in a suburb in Texas called Southlake, struggling with how to react to a series of racist incidents. Mike, how you doing? Mike Hixenbaugh: I’m doing good. Thanks for having me. Al Letson: Thank you. So I read They Came for the Schools and one of the things that really stood out to me and also, I don’t know, made the story not relatable but personal to me, is the story that you tell about your family at the beginning of it. And you don’t say this in the book, but I would call it your family dealing with racial terror in the suburbs. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Mike Hixenbaugh: Yeah, that’s what it felt like. For context, I’m a white man who grew up in nearly all white town in Ohio, but my wife is a biracial Black woman and we were raising our four kids in the suburbs outside of Houston, an incredibly diverse city whose suburbs are also rapidly diversifying and filled with people from all cultures and races and ethnicities. And in the summer of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, in the midst of just an ugly presidential election, in the aftermath of the nationwide protests for racial justice over George Floyd’s murder, my wife felt like she’s looking around our neighborhood, which was growing diverse, but it was just filled with vitriol in our neighborhood Facebook page, people claiming that Antifa was going to be coming to destroy our suburb and that Black Lives Matter activists were coming to destroy Timberlake Estates, this little tiny subdivision we were in. And as an act of stating, I’m here too, we live here too and we’re raising our family here, she put a sign on the yard. Black Lives Matter. At a time when it feels like a long time ago Al, but Black Lives Matter was Amazon banners across the top of your TV screen and Mitt Romney was chanting Black Lives Matter. This wasn’t a political statement, it was just a statement of human rights. And what happened in the aftermath of that was somebody came and did donuts and turfed our lawn every weekend for months afterward, right in front of that sign. And from the perspective that I brought, I’ve never felt that feeling before where it was like, oh, they’re targeting us, my people, my wife, my kids, me, and it’s about race. I realized as that was happening and what I was seeing in our suburb, this tension of these spaces that used to be all white that have grown much more diverse with diversity of ideas and people and cultures, that the ugliness of our national politics was really playing out at the most visceral level in these suburbs. As my wife was thinking, I want to get the hell out of here and looking at real estate listings, I, while supporting her in that, set out to figure out if I could tell this story, the story of what we were experiencing in our suburb. And it ended up leading me to schools, which is where else would these kinds of battles be playing out in suburbs if not inside public schools, the reason that these suburbs exists in the first place. Al Letson: Yeah. When I read that in your book, it took me back to being 14 years old, growing up in the deep south and having these white supremacists spray paint right outside of my window, no fat chicks or N-words. And we were the only Black family in the area. So as a young, I remember being 14, this sounds ridiculous, but I remember being 14 thinking, my mom is not fat, but they’re definitely talking about us with the N word. But that kind of sums up what it was like living in the suburbs in the deep south as a Black person, which I think also has definitely, it stayed with me all these years. I’m curious if that incident of somebody ripping up your yard, how that stayed with you and how it felt in your household as that was going on. I mean, it must’ve been scary. Mike Hixenbaugh: Oh, you could hear that four-wheeler engine roaring and it was after dark. The kids are in bed and you don’t know who’s doing it. You just feel sick in your stomach and yeah, I think the term you use at the top, this terrorism, it was that and it was meant clearly to tell us this is not welcome here, this is our space. And I think in 2020 and since then and really since maybe 2016, people who want to express that view and make that statement have been really emboldened. And it was really, really the case in the summer of 2020. I did some archival newspaper research as I was working on the book just looking through the types of things that were happening in suburban communities in 2020 and the number of racial terrorism incidents involving Black Lives Matter signs being set on fire, houses being set on fire, cars being spray-painted, houses with Black Lives matter signs being shot at in the suburbs outside Detroit. There were dozens and dozens of these incidents and the backlash to the movement for racial justice that was unleashed that summer really left these people feeling emboldened. It’s not like these suburbs suddenly got diverse and that there suddenly were Black people living in these communities. That transition and that diversification has been going on for decades, but in 2020 it became seemingly okay in the minds of some people to lash out and to attack folks for putting out a display of saying something as simple as that Black Lives Matter, Black people have the right to exist in this space. Al Letson: Right. I would say to that, that I think that that racial resentment has always been there under the surface. I think one thing that your book does really well is paint a picture of how we got here and that this didn’t just pop up overnight. And you actually in the book talk about how things were handled in Southlake during this time with the protests. Can you tell that story a little bit? Mike Hixenbaugh: Yeah. Just for context, Southlake Texas is the town at the center of the book. And in 2020, as a result of this incident in my yard, I set out to try to tell the story about the racial resentment in suburbs and that led me to Southlake where this very wealthy, affluent suburb outside of Dallas was embroiled in this fight over whether or not the school district would implement a diversity plan. And so it’s all the stuff we’ve been seeing for the last four years, but they were kind of at the leading edge of this. And so as I was reporting on that, the town in 2020 was divided over whether or not there should be diversity, equity, and inclusion program at the school district. But when you dug through the history of this town, you really realized that this fight wasn’t just something that sparked off because of the George Floyd protests. The foundation for the dispute in this community was laid in the 1950s and built out from there. And so suburbs across America, many of them were established as white spaces, sometimes explicitly so designed to cater to families who wanted to get out of integrated schools and cities. And that was no different for Southlake for decades and still today. This is a community that had set zoning policies that made it impossible for people without a lot of wealth to build a house. And so you’d have a certain amount of land, no apartments are allowed in this community. And in a nation where race is often a proxy for wealth, Southlake was white. Those policies kept Southlake White through the 1980s. But then as we saw all over the country, Black folks were looking for a good public school too and so they started moving to this community. And what I found in the newspaper archives and in the town’s history was almost from the beginning of that shift when non-white people moved to town, there were fights over it. And in the 1990s in Southlake, Texas, there was an incident where there were playing a school in the suburbs that had two Black star players in a football game. And Southlake kids from the Southlake High School were waving signs from the stands that said T-A-N-H-O, tear a n-word’s head off. And what was just striking to me was the school board and the community said, “Whoa, wait a second. We can’t have this.” The kids were disciplined. And the school board said, “We’re going to form a committee and we’re going to put together a plan and we’re going to do some cultural inclusive trainings and we’re going to make it clear that we don’t tolerate racial discrimination in Southlake, Texas.” And there’s been a pattern of that same thing and nothing really changing in all of the years leading up to 2020 when we again saw a wave of schools across the country doing the same thing as Southlake, which is try to address racism and getting blow back. And so this is not some new thing that we’re grappling with just because Trump has been reignited something. This is foundational stuff that has just never been dealt with in these communities. Al Letson: Right. It feels like, and I’m zooming out a little bit, but it feels like Southlake is definitely a microcosm of America in the sense that that racial resentment, that hatred is just under the surface and it just needs something small. Something really small can just bring it up and then it’s like a volcano overflowing everything. And we as Americans tend to not want to talk about it. So I remember when the George Floyd incident happened and all of these programs started. A friend of mine told me that I was a racial pessimist when I told him that all of this stuff that is happening right now is not going to last. And most of the Black people that I talk to believe the same thing. Actually, a lot of people that I talked to that were Black were just like, “I’m not participating in these DEI things because I know that it’s not going to last,” that it’s going to come back and when it swings back, it’s going to swing really hard. And I feel like that’s what we’re seeing right now. Mike Hixenbaugh: Yeah, that’s what we saw. That’s what I found in Southlake. And you’re right, Southlake, the book is told through the lens of Southlake, but it’s a microcosm. It’s a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America. And when I started reporting on this in 2020, I don’t think I fully grasped how much of a preview that this town was going to be. These ideas weren’t necessarily new, but they came very prominent and attractive to these conservative activists in 2020 and 2021. Al Letson: And it’s not just race that we’re talking about here too, we’re talking about issues of gender as well. You saw in suburban schools that teachers were targeted for supporting children who prefer different pronouns than were assigned to them at birth. Mike Hixenbaugh: Yeah, it’s funny. Everything that we’re seeing being implemented via executive orders by the Trump administration as it deals with education are things that bubbled out of local school board fights like the one in Southlake. And so yeah, what we saw in 2020 and 2021 was very much at that time focused on the idea of backlash against racial inclusion and what Chris Rufo and other conservative activists had coined as declared and called critical race theory. If you remember, 2021 is all about we got to stop critical race theory. Critical race theory, this idea that teaching kids an honest accounting of American history was an indoctrination. And what happened through 2021 into 2022 in Southlake and across the country was there were other groups that have long wanted to kind of stake their claim in public schools saw this backlash against critical race theory as an opportunity to not just beat back racial inclusion, but to reclaim schools as spaces that could prioritize and indoctrinate children with conservative Christian ideals, perspectives, and worldviews. And so of course as part of that, we started to see a real big push. Alongside pushing against programs that deal with race, we saw a backlash against any kind of LGBTQ inclusion. This is when we started seeing parents showing up at school board meetings reading from library books saying this book is pornography because it includes a passage about this transgender character. This is when we started seeing people like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida making wild and unsubstantiated and just false claims that teachers were convincing little children to change their genders or in some cases the claim that they were forcing little kids to change their genders. Teachers who identified as LGBTQ or who led programs like the Gay Straight Alliance started to become targeted and accused of being groomers or pedophiles. This was all kind of under the same umbrella of defeating wokeism in public education Al Letson: Coming up, Mike takes you inside the emotional school board meetings where parents themselves passionately plead their case against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Mike Hixenbaugh: And they claimed that this was part of a nationwide left wing plot to take over the country by indoctrinating children with Marxist liberal ideas. Al Letson: Hey, before we get there, I’m going to ask you to do me a favor. Have you followed or subscribed to Reveal in your favorite podcast app? If you have, would you give us a rating or review? And while I’m asking for things, how about sharing Reveal with your friends? All of these things help us build our Reveal community that you are already a part of. We can’t do it without you. Okay. stand by for more with Mike Hixenbaugh. This is More to the Story. I’m Al Letson and we’re chatting with reporter Mike Hixenbaugh about how conservative backlash in local school systems over things like DEI and transgender rights grew into a national rallying cry for the Trump administration. So Mike, picking up where we left off, when these battles were just beginning, it feels to me that the architects behind this movement tried out new language just to see how it would land with the audience. I.E. critical race theory. Why do you think it worked? I mean, why did parents focus their anger on something that really has nothing to do with what’s taught in schools? Mike Hixenbaugh: I don’t think you can find a lot of communities in the country where parents aren’t dissatisfied with some aspect of their child’s education. Public schools, maybe if you could point to lack of funding or the deep inequities in how we fund public education, there are legitimate concerns that people have with the state of education in America. And what we’ve seen since 2021, the conservative movement really galvanized around this idea of we’re going to fight the culture war in schools, and that’s going to be kind of a central plank to how we win elections. They have pointed to those legitimate concerns. You hear this from Moms for Liberty all the time. You hear this from Donald Trump’s new education secretary Linda McMahon all the time. Public schools test scores are way down. Our reading comprehension levels are way down. And rather than pointing to maybe the causes of those, which are those funding inequities I talked about, or in terms of reading scores, like there’s a whole debate in this country around how we teach kids to read. And for a generation now, we were teaching kids to read in a way that’s very questionable. That has nothing to do with DEI, but instead what they’ve said is schools are failing at these things because they’re so focused on indoctrinating your kids in critical race theory or DEI or gender ideology or social emotional learning when in reality those items aren’t really central to a kid’s school day. If you have a kid in school, you know this, at any public school in the country, I’m in Montgomery County, Maryland now, which is a very progressive district. The teachers are really focused on math, science, and reading. They’re really, really focused on those things. And the school day isn’t being taken over by these things even in progressive districts. But the messaging has really weaponized that idea that like, “Oh, you’re unhappy with your kids’ education? Do you know that it’s because of transgender people? Or it’s because these schools have been taken over by progressives who want to destroy America?” And that’s for sure become part of the rhetoric. Al Letson: And in Southlake they called it a forced liberal agenda. Mike Hixenbaugh: Yes. And what’s interesting in Southlake is when you rewind to back to 2018, what sparked the reckoning over race and inclusion in Southlake, there was this incident where white kids filmed themselves chanting the N-word and then posted it online. And that led the community, this majority white wealthy but diversifying community to try to do something about it. And the people who came together on the school board to say, “We’re going to put together a diversity committee, we’re going to come up with a plan.” They were almost all Republicans. This town got filled with Republican leadership. These are mostly all white conservative Republicans. And yet when this school board unveiled its plan in 2020, which was this 36 page diversity and inclusion plan that called for DEI trainings, an attempt to recruit more diverse teachers, those sorts of things, the conservatives in the community reacted by accusing the school board of forcing a far left liberal ideology onto their kids. And they claimed that this was part of a nationwide left wing plot to take over the country by indoctrinating children with Marxist liberal ideas. Al Letson: You wrote a story about the growing campaign to ban books in Katy, Texas that included an interview with a 17-year-old student whose parents were not accepting of her LGBTQ identity. What was the reaction to that? Mike Hixenbaugh: Yeah, this was in 2022, and Katy, Texas, a large suburb outside of Houston, very large diverse suburban school district. Almost a hundred thousand kids go to this school system. And this is the beginning of the campaign to ban books that mention LGBTQ people from public schools. Public school libraries. And for that article I spoke with that queer 17-year-old student who felt like because her parents were very conservative and unaccepting of her identity, that the school library was one of, maybe the only place where she could read books YA novels that included characters who she saw herself reflected in without maybe getting in trouble with her parents. And so she spent a lot of time in that library reading those books, and she named several that were really important to her. And many of those books were now being pulled off shelves because of a single parent’s complaint that equating an LGBTQ storyline to pornography, essentially. Published that story and the next day my phone started blowing up with phone calls and text messages from a few different phone numbers that I didn’t recognize. And finally one of them texted and another one emailed. And essentially they told me that they represented a group of concerned moms in Katy who had read the article, had seen that as a journalist I had spoken to a seventeen-year-old student and had included that she was queer, so her sexual orientation. And they told me that an adult man talking to a teenager about sexual orientation is evidence, is like the first step of grooming, and that they believe that that was enough evidence to file a police report. And they told me they were preparing to contact Katy Police and to report me for soliciting a minor. Essentially saying that we’re going to call police and publicly accuse you of being a child sex predator. And yeah, I think you can relate to this. As journalists from the beginning of our careers, we get used to mean messages when you publish something. You get angry notes. Sometimes they’re kind of unhinged. And sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it can be really cruel and mean and degrading and you get thick skin. You kind of learn to let that roll. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years, so I’m used to it. When I got that call and those messages, it hit differently. I was surprised at how much it upset me. Al Letson: Yeah, I mean someone’s calling you a predator. I mean that’s- Mike Hixenbaugh: Yeah. Al Letson: …And I think to me the thought process would be I could lose everything for doing nothing. Just the accusation in America could destroy your career. Mike Hixenbaugh: Exactly, right. And I’m a dad of four kids. I’m like, just the thought of someone putting that out there in the world was… I knew that the criminal charge, that was bullshit. There’s no case. However, it hit me like a punch to the stomach. I had to go hug my wife and be like, “Why the hell am I doing this?” I literally had the thought, why do I do this? What good am I doing? Got over that eventually, but what stuck with me was I realized that allegation of you’re a groomer, you’re a child, sex predator, that’s what people have been accusing school librarians and teachers and public librarians of for the last several years. How does it feel when you’re a teacher and someone publicly on Facebook or somewhere comes to a school board meeting and says, “You’re a groomer, you’re a child sex predator.” How do you not say, “Screw this. I’m done with teaching.” And actually, I know that teachers have said that, have said, “I can’t do this. They don’t pay me enough for this.” And that’s what’s happening and continues to happen in schools across the country. I just saw, just as we were preparing to record a story out of Houston where I used to live, where a Moms for Liberty representative has came forward with a story claiming that a teacher forcibly transitioned a child. And no evidence for this, these stories almost always fall apart. It’s usually a teacher who’s just being supportive to a kid who asked to use different pronouns or a different name. But as a result of that, Governor Greg Abbott in Texas put out a note saying he’s opening an investigation into the school district and somewhere connected to that is some teacher who’s not been named yet, but who’s being basically accused of forcing a kid to change genders. And how do you… you’re just trying to teach kids to read and be kind to each other, how do you move on from that? Al Letson: Yeah, why do you keep doing this? You’ve got a family, you have been the victim of racial terror and you’ve seen the ugliness that working on this kind of beat brings with it. Why do this beat? Why tell these stories? Mike Hixenbaugh: That’s a great question. I’m still clinging to this naive idea that keeps getting challenged that if we lay out all of the details and the facts of what’s happening and debunk or contextualize the false things that are getting put out there, these false narratives, that people will have a healthier understanding of their neighbors, of their communities, and that it might trigger some people who are maybe buying into the false notion that kids are being forced to change genders or that white kids are being taught to hate themselves, that they would maybe read the full story and realize, oh, that’s a political game that’s being played. That’s not really happening. That’s someone trying to dupe me. And so I still see purpose in the work. I get discouraged when we live in a moment when any claim can just get thrown out there, completely made up from the most powerful people in the country. The richest man in the world can just make something of a post in the internet. And for people, even though it’s not true, it becomes truth for a lot of people. That’s frustrating and hard, but I still see a lot of purpose in the work that we do and the work that you all do at Reveal and in other outlets to help people have a fuller understanding of the world to expose injustice. This stuff all still matters. Al Letson: Yeah. Mike Hixenbaugh, thank you so much for coming on and talking to me today. Mike Hixenbaugh: This has been great. Thanks for having me. Al Letson: Mike Hixenbaugh’s book is called They Came for the Schools. You can also check out his two incredible podcasts, Southlake and Grapevine, all about his reporting on the Texas suburban school systems. And I’m also going to suggest you check out our Reveal episode called The Culture War Goes to College, where we follow journalists at one student newspaper as they document how Governor Ron DeSantis’s war on DEI transformed their Florida Honors College. We’ll put links to all of this good listening in our show notes. Lastly, just a reminder that we are listener supported, and that means listeners like you. You can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift. And thank you. This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGuirk-Allison. Theme music and engineering help by Fernando, my man yo, Arruda, and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this again next week. This is More to the Story.