Disillusioned

Benjamin Herold, a journalist who covers education, follows five American households through their suburban lives. Their stories are woven together with the history of their towns and of the nation, showing how hope and a long habit of refusing to acknowledge race shape both suburbia and its classrooms.

In a middle-class Black family's suburb outside Atlanta, parents clash with a school system that seems determined to penalize their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family moves into a wealthy enclave, only to find that the country's broader upheavals have followed them there. On Chicago's North Shore, a multiracial mother joins a campaign by highly progressive residents against the entrenched liberal order of their town. In Compton, California, a place whose suburban character has largely vanished, undocumented Hispanic parents entrust their gifted son's future to the educators at an exceptional elementary school. Near Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves onto the street where Herold grew up and must face the damage that white families like his left behind.

Herold's central claim is that suburbs and their schools have fallen into a damaging loop. For decades, upwardly mobile white families drew advantages from heavily subsidized suburbs and then moved on before the costs of upkeep and repairs came due, leaving mostly Black and Brown families who followed to deal with the consequences. Shifting demographics and the fact that endless expansion is no longer possible are now disrupting that pattern. Ordinary suburban families are being forced to confront realities their communities were built to avoid, and they find themselves at the center of the nation's most urgent debates.

The book asks how America can reckon with its troubled history and how it can build a future in which every child has a real chance to thrive. Herold examines suburban public schools and their boards, which he sees as the decisive battleground for reviving the nation's stalled promise. Working alongside Bethany Smith, the woman from his former neighborhood who wrote an epilogue for the book, he sketches a path toward renewal.