Banned Books Week: Mike Hixenbaugh, author of "The Came for the Schools"

In They Came for the Schools, award-winning journalist Mike Hixenbaugh reveals how a school board win for the conservative right in one Texas suburb inspired a Christian nationalist campaign now threatening to undermine public education in America.

Hixenbaugh will be in conversation with Paul Tough, Austin-based author of The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us.

Banned Book Club Kits of They Came for the Schools will be available for library patrons to check out.

Co-sponsored with PEN America Austin and the Austin Public Library.

Mike Hixenbaugh
Mike Hixenbaugh is a senior investigative reporter for NBC News, co-creator of the Southlake and Grapevine podcasts, and author of They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms.
Hixenbaugh’s reporting in recent years on the battles over race, gender, and sexuality in public schools won a Peabody Award and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
While working as a newspaper reporter in Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas, Hixenbaugh uncovered deadly failures in the U.S. military, abuses in the child welfare system, and safety lapses at major hospitals, winning numerous national awards and triggering reforms aimed at saving lives and keeping families together.

Hixenbaugh lives in Maryland with his wife and four children.

Paul Tough
Paul Tough is the author, most recently, of The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us. (previously titled The Years That Matter Most). His three previous books include How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character which was translated into 27 languages and spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover and paperback best-seller lists.

Paul is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine; his writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, GQ, and Esquire and on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

He has worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Magazine and as a reporter and producer for the public-radio program "This American Life" He was the founding editor of Open Letters, an online magazine.

He lives with his wife and two sons in Austin, Texas.

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