Disillusioned

August 1, 2023

Short-listed for the Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, this work by education journalist Herold tracks the clash of history and aspiration in U.S. suburbia today. A middle-class Black family challenges the school system, a conservative white family can't escape social change by moving to an affluent enclave, a multiracial mother joins a progressive challenge to her town's liberal status quo, undocumented Latine parents hope a new school will help their gifted son, and Black mother Bethany Smith (who provides an epilogue) settles on the same street where the white author grew up. Prepub Alert.

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November 6, 2023
Education journalist Herold reveals in his eye-opening debut how suburban public schools are failing an increasingly poor student population, and argues that the suburban American Dream is now an entrapping myth. In the early postwar decades, Herold explains, white families and their children thrived in the suburbs, thanks to supportive government policies. When these suburbs ceased growing, however, residents aged, tax bases shrank, and school funding declined. As poorer families and families of color took up residence, they encountered deteriorating schools and rising taxes. Drawing on three years spent following five families as the parents worked to assure quality education for their children, Herold highlights how interactions with teachers, school administrators, and school boards were integral to the parents’ hands-on approach. His subjects include well-off families, such as the Beckers in Lucas, Tex., who were able to abandon the local schools when they failed to meet expectations, as well as low-income families like the Hernandezes in Compton, Calif., who struggled to advance their children through an inadequate school system. Herold’s portrayals are fine-grained and attentive to the conflicts that pervade interactions between parents and educators, though some readers may be skeptical that, in Herold’s telling, the parents are always right, while teachers and school administrators fall short. Still, this is an illuminating account of a poorly understood crisis currently facing America’s public schools.

December 1, 2023
This is a book about suburbia, a utopia first imagined in the mid-twentieth century as a land of peace, safety, and unlimited upward mobility; it's also about the lies and deceptions fueled by post-WWII financial incentives that led to the flight of middle-class white people from cities, bolstered by suburbs' restrictive subdivision zoning laws and evolving school district boundaries designed to keep out ""urbanites,"" code for people of color. Investigative journalist Herold, raised in a Pittsburgh suburb, relates the contemporary suburban experiences of five families in Texas, Georgia, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and California: a series of thoughtful, informative, and very disturbing accounts of once-hopeful individuals continually encountering institutional racism, embedded school system exclusivity, and crumbling community infrastructures. Herold's subjects cite better education and equal opportunity as reasons for making the move to the suburbs, and it's painful to see how often teachers, school administrators and counselors, city officials, and lending institutions mired in barely disguised racial discrimination fail them. This testimony from the Becker, Robinson, Adesina, Smith, and Hernandez families deserves a wide audience.

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Starred review from December 15, 2023
A well-informed, ambitious narrative about the simmering inequities in American suburbs. Though Herold grew up in "a middle-class white family that passively accepted suburbia's bounty," he convincingly argues that numerous factors, including "sweeping demographic changes, rising housing costs, and the vanishing heart of America's middle class," alongside the troubling history of segregation enforced by structural racism, have created a systemic crisis: "Suburbia is now home to a collision of competing dreams, each of which seems to be crumbling." In his energetic debut, Herold chronicles how he "traveled the country, immersing [himself] in the lives of families on the front lines of suburban change," tracking several families' arcs amid the mostly declining fortunes of representational suburbs, including communities outside Atlanta and Dallas, progressive Evanston, Illinois, and the notoriously troubled city of Compton, California, arguing that these locales each demonstrate a "larger pattern of racialized development and decline." Indeed, he discovers a disturbingly pervasive entropy in areas across the U.S., including Penn Hills, located outside an increasingly gentrifying Pittsburgh. Contrastingly, the author portrays the "anxiety about the erosion of long-standing privileges" of a conservative white family who moved to a new Texas exurb where they encountered similar strife concerning finances, infrastructure, and education budgets. Herold ably navigates these issues, particularly the divisive role played by school board politics ("public education in America had become a hot-button issue") and sets the dreams of these diverse families against regional history. The author was still conducting interviews during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which further fractured each community's social cohesion. As he writes, "conflicts over masks, vaccines, and racial equality were all raging anew." Herold adeptly manages the sprawling storytelling and subtopics (albeit frequently focused on bureaucratic minutiae) with empathy, varied scenes, and well-rounded characterizations. A deeply valuable study of the decline of suburbia.

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