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

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The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

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4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike Hixenbaugh first knew things had changed when someone on a four-wheeler started ripping up his lawn after his wife placed a Black Lives Matter sign outside their home on the suburban outskirts of Houston.

Hixenbaugh is an award-winning investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s covered wrongdoing within the child welfare system, safety lapses inside hospitals, and deadly failures in the US Navy. But when his front yard was torn apart in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he saw a story about race and politics collide at his own front door. So like any investigative journalist, he started investigating, and his reporting about the growing divides in his neighborhood soon led him to the public schools.

As more than a dozen states sue the Trump administration over its policies aimed at ending public schools’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Hixenbaugh about how America’s public schools have become “a microcosm” for the country’s political and cultural fights—“a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America.”

Listen: The Culture War Goes to College (Reveal)

Read: At the Heritage Foundation, the Anti-DEI Crusade Is Part of a Bigger War (Mother Jones)

Read: They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms, by Mike Hixenbaugh

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Listen: Southlake/Grapevine podcasts (NBC News)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Federal dollars could dry up for schools that don't ditch diversity programs.
0:06.0	That don't commit to dropping DEI programs within 10 days.
0:09.0	...inmediate hold of any practice that factors in race, from admissions to financial aid to hiring.
0:15.0	Bandbooks, purged websites, public schools forced to sign anti-DEI pledges, and billions of federal research
0:23.3	dollars ripped from universities. Trump's attack on DEI is coming in hot and fast. But it's
0:30.5	no surprise if you've been paying attention to the battles in local school boards across America
0:35.5	suburbs.
0:44.1	I've never felt that feeling before, where it was like, oh, they're targeting us, my people,
0:49.2	my wife, my kids, me, and it's about race.
0:55.6	The ugliness of our national politics was really playing out at the most visceral level in these suburbs.
1:04.7	Coming up, NBC investigative reporter Mike Hicksenbaugh on how the national culture war over how your kids are taught ended up ripping up his town and his front lawn, literally.
1:09.7	Stay with us. This is more to the story. I'm Al Letson. The Trump administration's war on DEI is rippling through
1:36.5	agencies, nonprofits, corporate America, and school systems. But this fight over diversity, equity,
1:42.6	and inclusion didn't start in the Oval Office,
1:45.7	and it didn't just start this year. School boards and education have been on the front lines
1:50.7	of the culture war since before Brown v. Board of Education. This purge of DEI is just the
1:57.8	newest battle. Mike Hicksenbaugh is a senior investigative reporter for NBC News.
2:03.8	He's won awards for reporting on race, gender, and sexuality. But that's come at a personal cost,
2:09.1	too. We'll get into that. And talk about the book he published last year. It's called
2:13.8	They Came for the Schools. One town's fight over Race and Identity and the New War for America's Classrooms.
2:21.9	It's set in a suburb in Texas called South Lake, struggling with how to react to a series of racist incidents.
2:29.9	Mike, how you doing?
	...

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