THEY CAME FOR THE SCHOOLS

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.