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.”

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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)