Texas Schools at a Crossroads: Identity, Politics, and Public Education in Hixenbaugh's 'They Came for the Schools'
They Came for the Schools, a new book by journalist Mike Hixenbaugh, offers a riveting exploration of the convergence of social identity, culture, religion, race, and politics, and how these forces have come together and threatening public education in the suburbs of North Texas and across this country.
We are pleased to announce that Mike Hixenbaugh is an upcoming guest on the Speaking of Kids podcast 🎧 to be broadcast on Wednesday, June 5, 2024.
Hixenbaugh’s narrative tells the story of how the communities of Southlake and Grapevine, and thereby their community schools, have adopted traditions and identities that are often more aligned with the hopes and desires of adults rather than the needs of students. While some students may thrive in this environment, others feel marginalized, excluded, and left behind.
The story begins with a viral video of white students from Carroll High School repeatedly chanting a racial slur and laughing. For Carroll student Zaneta Ogunmola, the viral video was a breaking point. She painfully recalls:
I never knew a single word could reduce me to feeling like gum on the bottom of someone’s shoe, like nothing.
No student should ever feel this way, and proactive steps should be taken to prevent such incidents. As Hixenbaugh documents, this incident is one of a far more extensive history of racist and homophobic comments, taunts, and jokes directed at students of color and LGBTQ kids in both school districts.
In 2018, following the viral video and extensive testimony from the community calling for change, there was initial hope and signs that Carroll Independent School District would take steps to address racist and homophobic bullying behavior.
Unfortunately, the school district later reversed course and tragically regressed.
However, despite setbacks and disappointments, Hixenbaugh does show how, for many educators and community members, public education is about ensuring that all of the school’s children, such as Zaneta, are valued and supported. They see the mission of public schools to treat all children as worthy of support and education and echo the sentiment of Texas educator Rita Pierson, who said:
Every child deserves a champion – an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.
Unfortunately, not everyone shares this inclusive vision. Instead, many in Southlake advocated for protecting and promoting “tradition”, “heritage,” and the status quo, concentrating attention on a select group of “their” children while neglecting “other” people’s kids. This perspective is epitomized by groups like the Southlake Families PAC, which campaigns to “protect our traditional way of life” and cast supporters of change and inclusivity as “extremists.”
Education is a children’s issue – or, it should be. Regrettably, some individuals, often without direct ties to the schools or the community, politicize education, framing it as an “us versus them” battle that leaves children’s interests, needs, and concerns largely ignored and in tatters. To them, children are merely pawns in broader political, religious, and cultural wars.
Video: Far-right Christian dominionists infiltrate schools, civic offices in Texas – Antonia Hylton - MSNBC
Hixenbaugh point out that today’s “school wars” are not new. Public education has historically been a battleground for some of America’s most contentious debates – from evolution to segregation to sex education to “secular humanism”. He explains:
America’s public schools, since their very creation, repeatedly have become ground zero for the country’s most divisive battles over politics and civil rights – from the fight over evolution and segregation to those over sex ed and school prayer. After all, it’s in our schools – in social studies curricula and civics lessons and mandatory reading lists – that America is grappling with how to tell its story to new generations, how to teach kids what’s right and wrong, what’s true and what’s false. And this grappling has gotten ugly.
Texas and Book Banning
My own experience as a Texas high school student during the 1980s – when the Moral Majority was rising and figures like Mel and Norma Gabler were making national headlines to ban and censor books – mirror some of the current battles over education and censorship. The stakes were high then, as they are now. The Texas Monthly reported in 1982:
Texas is the nation’s largest single purchaser of textbooks… Making the Texas list is practically a guarantee of profit for a publisher; failure to make it may doom a book, or a whole series of books, to extinction.
At my high school, a parent attempted to censor Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales inspired Richard Parker, one of the editors of our high school newspaper (Coronado Explorer), to write a lengthy piece highlighting the attempted censorship at our school and tied it to the Gablers’s statewide efforts. This inspired students to think and speak up about academic freedom and to think about the rights of children in school and in the broader community.
Who decides what is taught – and what is not – remains a central conflict in past and current “school wars.”
Some advocate for a narrow, prescriptive curriculum that limits students’ exposure to diverse perspectives. Sadly, Texas has been a national leader in the movement to ban classroom and library books.
Fortunately, there is growing opposition to book bans.
Opponents of these bans argue that learning should be an active, engaging experience that encourages students to explore various perspectives, cultures, and ideas with empathy.
Educator Arthur Camins explains:
The reasons for children to develop and employ a critical perspective are timeless. Empathy should be a universal value that is reinforced in school. Students’ need to understand and question the world around them is even more compelling today than it was twenty-five years ago. The global challenges that face humanity — peace; climate change; environmental degradation; economic, social and political inequality; sustainable development; health and food security — will get answered one way or another. What and how children learn in school will influence whether they contribute to solutions or become the hapless victims of the decisions of others.
Kids understand these stakes, if only more people would listen to them as Hixenbaugh and Hylton have. Hixenbaugh’s book is a crucial reminder that while the debate rages on, the children are the ones who bear the brunt of the “school wars.”
What Happens in Southlake…
In Southlake and Grapevine, Hixenbaugh captures pivotal moments in which school, political, and community leaders were challenged to create an inclusive, protective, and supportive path for students who felt marginalized, bullied, threatened, or excluded.
For example, after the video of white Carroll High School students chanting a racial slur went viral, Southlake city council member John Huffman acknowledged, “Racism is real. It’s around us and sweeping it under the rug is not gonna help.”
Tragically, Huffman and other leaders would later backtrack from taking affirmative steps. In Southlake, attempts to address issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia were perceived as a challenge to the status quo, including “tradition” and “heritage”. Efforts toward “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion” (DEI) were dismissed, including recommendations made by a task force appointment by the district, which Russell Maryland (a former Dallas Cowboys football player and a member of the task force) described as “a basic plan of human decency, empathy, kindness, inclusion, and understanding about other cultures.”
It is important to recognize that the antonyms of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are “segregation, conformity, inequity, injustice, bias, discrimination, exclusion, and omission.” After rejecting the recommendations, the school district and community chose, instead, to ban books featuring diverse perspectives, whitewash the curricula to present a distorted narrative of history, and impose speech codes on teachers and librarians that would further target, marginalize, and “otherize” Carroll’s Black, Brown, and LGBTQ students.
For those educators and librarians who sought to elevate marginalized voices or provide students with access to literature and history that might challenge the status quo or “tradition”, many would be attacked, demonized, or fired
When accompanied by the push by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to reject any new funding to support public schools in the last legislative session (despite Texas having a record budget surplus), their push for private school vouchers that would further erode funding for public education, and their role in the state takeover of public school districts, it is no surprise that many Texas’s teachers are leaving the profession.
The Demographics Are Changing Deep in the Heart of Texas
There are a number of demographic, political, religious, racial, and cultural forces that Hixenbaugh touches upon that help explain this fear or what some refer to as “moral panic” that some believe is threatening the values, interests, or traditions of communities like Southlake and Grapevine.
One notable trend is the growing diversity in our nation’s suburbs. While some communities have openly embraced the trend, believing their schools should celebrate the growing diversity of their students and communities as a strength, others view it as a threat or “Great Replacement” of the White majority. Hixenbaugh describes this as a “once-fringe belief by some on the far right that white Americans are being demographically, culturally, and politically replaced by non-white people through mass migration.”
Despite the misplaced fear, the reality is that diversity enriches our society and community, a point famously articulated by author Maya Angelou:
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength. We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter their color; equal in importance no matter their texture.
The fear of replacement is also political, as Democrats in Texas continue to make gains that may sooner or later threaten the Republican majority in the Lone Star State and suburban communities like Southlake and Grapevine. My high school friend Richard Parker reported on these trends in his book, Lone Star Nation: Now Texas Will Transform America.
In responses to narrowing election margins, conservatives in Texas and other states have formed a new wave of political action committees (PACs) to raise money and elect conservatives to state and local offices, including school boards.
Hixenbaugh documents how the Southlake Families PAC, for example, was formed in North Texas and has asked school board candidates a series of questions related to their party affiliation, their support or opposition to Black Lives Matter, their position on life “from conception to natural death,” “support of the Second Amendment,” and whether they are Christian – issues than would likely never factor in their work on a school board – to make its endorsements.
Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have chosen not to fund public schools despite a record budget surplus. They have also failed to address school safety issues even after the Santa Fe and Uvalde school shootings, and are supporting a well-financed movement to give funding to religious schools through vouchers, which would increase segregation. Additionally, they are pushing for the inclusion of the Ten Commandments, prayer, and unlicensed school chaplains to replace school counselors in the public schools.
These actions are being pushed by supporters of Christian nationalism and Seven Mountains Dominionism, with substantial financial backing from a few Texas oil and gas billionaires and Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz.
To understand more about the growing influence of religion, and specifically Dominionism, in North Texas politics and public schools, listen 🎧 to Episode #2, “The Seven Mountains,” of the Grapevine podcast by Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton
Or, watch the following video, “Politics and religion’s growing influence in three Texas school districts” by NBC’s Hylton
These developments make it an increasingly challenging time for those who value the separation of church and state in Texas.
Listening to the Kids
They Came for the Schools tells such a moving and insightful narrative about politics, education, religion, culture, and society in this country, but my favorite thing about it is how Hixenbaugh sought out and centered students as the protagonists in response to the actions and inactions of Southlake and Texas politicians.
In an interview about his book, Hixenbaugh discusses how it was intentional but difficult:
The stakeholders who are most important, the whole reason we have an education system, are children. And it can be difficult to fully capture their perspective, for all the reasons lots of great education reporters out there know, which is that they’re children. And with the stories I’ve been writing — dealing with concerns around racism and discrimination in schools — sometimes these kids have been traumatized.
So it takes time to find young people willing and able to talk and to win their trust.
In both Hixenbaugh’s book and his collaboration with Antonia Hylton on their outstanding podcasts, Southlake and Grapevine, the best interests, needs, and concerns of the kids are never treated as an afterthought.
Hixenbaugh explains:
A viewpoint conspicuously absent from the debate was that of Carroll students, who – even as the adults in town went on bickering – were learning to live with the consequences of what everyone seemed to agree was a broken system.
This attention to the true protagonists – the children – is unusual and deserves recognition.
In an analysis of media coverage of children’s issues by FrameWorks Institute, the researchers find the media is often parent-centric. Their report highlights:
…the focus on parents leaves children in the background. Media coverage in which children are invisible undermines collective concern about children themselves.
For the adults in Southlake and Grapevine who were garnering the bulk of attention from other media sources, they focus has been on politics, ideology, religion, and their own interests (often framed as “parental rights”) rather than the concerns of children, who would never center book bans as a top interest.
Hixenbaugh and Hylton often seemed to be the only ones listening to the students and bringing their voices to the table, even though they were attacked for doing so.
The insights provided by the students demonstrate that they were attentively following the debates and how they are often more insightful and informed than many of the adults making the policy decisions.
While some parents stood up at school board meetings and opposed school district action to address racist incidents because they worried about how the white students might feel, they neglected to consider the dire and troubling consequences for Carroll’s other students like Zaneta, who expressed feeling “like gum on the bottom of someone’s shoe, like nothing.”
Hixenbaugh’s book serves as a crucial reminder that while the adults are fighting, it is the children who bear the brunt of the “school wars.”
Although there is much to learn and consider from Hixenbaugh’s critically important book, if there is just one thing that people should be able to agree on, it should be that no child is ever left feeling as Zaenta did. For the sake of the kids and our future, communities and schools should embrace an educational environment where every child feels valued, respected, and supported.
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