They Came for the Schools
One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The urgent, revelatory story of how a school board win for the conservative right in one Texas suburb inspired a Christian nationalist campaign now threatening to undermine public education in America—from an NBC investigative reporter and co-creator of the Peabody Award–winning and Pulitzer Prize finalist Southlake podcast.
Award-winning journalist Mike Hixenbaugh delivers the 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.
They Came for the Schools delivers an essential take on Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, as they demean public schools and teachers and boost the Christian right’s vision. Hixenbaugh brings to light fascinating connections between this political and cultural moment and past fundamentalist campaigns to censor classroom lessons. Finally, They Came for the Schools traces the rise of a new resistance movement led by a diverse coalition of student activists, fed-up educators, and parents who are beginning to win select battles of their own: a blueprint, they hope, for gaining inclusive and civil schools for all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
