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)

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The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well.

According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.

This week on Reveal, reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk.

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Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has spent years talking with people living in rural parts of the country who have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs and shuttered coal mines. They’re the very people President Donald Trump argues will benefit most from his sweeping wave of tariffs and recent executive orders aimed at reviving coal mining in the US. But Hochschild is skeptical that Trump’s policies will actually benefit those in rural America. But Hochschild argues that Trump’s policies will only fill an emotional need for those in rural America.

In her latest book, Stolen Pride, Hochschild visited Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city in Appalachia where coal jobs were leaving, opioids were arriving, and a white supremacist march was being planned. The more she talked to people, the more she saw how Trump played on their shame and pride about their downward mobility and ultimately used that to his political advantage.
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with Hochschild about the long slide of downward mobility in rural America and why she thinks Trump’s policies ultimately won’t benefit his most core supporters.

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 | Host: Al Letson
Donate today at Revealnews.org/more

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Revealnews.org/weekly

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Read: Farmers in Trump Country Banked on Clean Energy Grants. Then Things Changed. (Mother Jones)

Read: Trump’s Trade War Is Here and Promises to Get Ugly (Mother Jones)

Listen: The Many Contradictions of a Trump Victory (Reveal)