Publishers Weekly
★ 03/25/2024
In a meticulous debut exposé adapted from the Peabody Award–winning podcast Southlake, Hixenbaugh recaps how the recent conservative war on the teaching of material concerning race, sexuality, and gender kicked off in Southlake, Tex. He begins in 2018, when the “high-end suburban utopia” was propelled into the national spotlight over acrimony surrounding the school district’s proposed diversity plan. Meant to address repeated incidents of harassment directed at LGBTQ students and students of color, the plan faced opposition from conservative parents and local activists, who eventually reinvigorated a defunct political action committee, or PAC, to fund a takeover of the school board. The new board scrapped the diversity plan, relaxed the anti-bullying disciplinary code, banned books, and sanctioned teachers. Southlake became a national model for the right, as local groups across the country took similar steps to win school board seats. Hixenbaugh traces the web of conservative media figures and think tanks who promoted this activism, and he tracks how it developed hand in hand with a new wave of right-wing Christian radicalization that echoes the 1970s and ’80s campaign against “secular humanism” in schools spearheaded by evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. What emerges is an extraordinarily detailed analysis of current conservative thought and political activity. It’s a vital work of reportage. (May)
From the Publisher
Propulsive… This razor-sharp book is the masterful culmination of years of reportage… a work of compassion, one that never fails to center the vulnerability or the dignity of students.” — Washington Post
“From the front lines of America’s culture wars, Mike Hixenbaugh delivers a clear-eyed, intensely reported lesson about the underhanded efforts to privatize what was once our finest and most democratic institution—our schools. As propulsive as it is important and teeming with narrative surprise, They Came for the Schools harkens to the great J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground.” — Beth Macy, author of Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
“This book is not only a gripping, up-close story of one Texas town’s descent into political madness, it’s also the larger tale of how powerful moneyed interests are stoking our divisions and turning classrooms into battlegrounds.” — Paul Tough, author, The Inequality Machine: How Colleges Divide Us
"One of the most important battles raging across our country is what our children are taught about our history. With penetrating reporting, research, and crisp writing, Mike Hixenbaugh delivers a must-read dispatch from the front lines of a war over not just the complexities of our past, but the future of our multiracial democracy." — Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progres
"A long overdue investigation of powerful forces battling behind the scenes to control what our children are taught about the American story. Hixenbaugh reveals a coordinated and growing attack on educators who want their classrooms to be places where all children can thrive, think freely, and learn a full accounting of who we are as a nation." — Soledad O’Brien, host, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien
“In They Came for the Schools, Mike Hixenbaugh has produced an absorbing if deeply unsettling account of how our public schools have become the nation's foremost cultural war zones. Hixenbaugh's even-handed tale of a seemingly idyllic Texas suburban high school's descent into hysteria is a parable of polarization on steroids, made all the more poignant for the children who are caught in the political crossfire.” — Robert Draper, author, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind
“An extraordinarily detailed analysis of current conservative thought and political activity. It’s a vital work of reporting.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Detailed and sharp-edged… A timely case study from a war of ideas being waged, ever more intensely, across the nation.” — Kirkus Reviews
“This is a frightening but all too real piece of reporting, and belongs in every library.” — Booklist
“Written by award-winning investigative reporter Mike Hixenbaugh, They Came for the Schools tells the eye-opening story of well-funded conservative backlash against a school board in Southlake, Texas. This book pulls back the curtain on the powerful forces driving the present-day crusade on book bans, curricula, and rights for minority and LGBTQ+ students.” — Ash Center, Harvard Kennedy School, Antiracism Summer Reading List
Kirkus Reviews
2024-04-17
A Peabody Award–winning journalist delivers a frontline account of the right-wing campaign to control public school curricula.
Southlake, a well-to-do Dallas suburb, was an unlikely battleground over public education. “The town’s economic boom ensured the district was flush with resources,” writes NBC senior investigative reporter Hixenbaugh, and that meant plenty of funding for advanced courses that dealt with important matters such as the idea that the Civil War had something to do with slavery. Like the rest of white America, Southlake divided sharply when Barack Obama became the first Black president, and once Trump came into office, a slice of the student body and their parents began to vent racist ideology with gleeful abandon. Arrayed against this group were progressive parents and students who pressed for the Southlake school board to take such actions as declare support for Black Lives Matter and “impose a ban on racist imagery, including the Confederate flag, from all district facilities.” With that, a new civil war brewed, with an inevitable result. “The local fight in Southlake,” writes the author, “had caught the attention of powerful forces in the far-right wing of the Texas GOP—and they’d seen an opportunity.” That opportunity included pouring money into a campaign to turn the school board and district into instruments of the approved right-wing curriculum: no hint of discussion of injustices done to marginalized communities, no hint that America was anything other than a Christian nation, no hint of so-called woke ideas. Hixenbaugh’s account of the battle is detailed and sharp-edged, even if the results are as expected: dedicated teachers forced out of their jobs due to the altered curricula, progressive high school graduates vowing to continue the fight, and smugly satisfied Trumpists in power.
A timely case study from a war of ideas being waged, ever more intensely, across the nation.
