They came for the schools One town's fight over race and identity, and the new war for America's classrooms

Southlake, a Texas suburb near Dallas, is the subject of this investigation by Hixenbaugh, an NBC News investigative journalist. On the surface, Southlake seems lush and beautiful, with an extremely successful public-school system--exactly the place where a mixed-race family with three kids would relocate to from L.A. This family's experience and that of other children of color is laid out in no uncertain terms: what seemed so perfect is in fact a place where racist behavior goes unpunished and teachers are prevented from teaching. The tool making this possible is the politicizing of the local school board. Long a body known for its sleepy oversight of general procedure--in this town and others--the school board became a route for the evangelical right wing to take control of curriculum and policy in a way that leaves students traumatized and teachers giving up dream careers. While the focus is on Texas, schools in Virginia and Florida are also discussed. This is a frightening but all too real piece of reporting, and belongs in every library.

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)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.