Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs

by Benjamin Herold

Overview

"Astonishingly important.” —Alex Kotlowitz, The Atlantic

Through the stories of five American families, a masterful and timely exploration of how hope, history, and racial denial collide in the suburbs and their schools

Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where author Benjamin Herold grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his.

Disillusioned braids these human stories together with penetrating local and national history to reveal a vicious cycle undermining the dreams upon which American suburbia was built. For generations, upwardly mobile white families have extracted opportunity from the nation’s heavily subsidized suburbs, then moved on before the bills for maintenance and repair came due, leaving the mostly Black and Brown families who followed to clean up the ensuing mess. But now, sweeping demographic shifts and the dawning realization that endless expansion is no longer feasible are disrupting this pattern, forcing everyday families to confront a truth their communities were designed to avoid: The suburban lifestyle dream is a Ponzi scheme whose unraveling threatens us all.

How do we come to terms with this troubled history? How do we build a future in which all children can thrive?  Drawing upon his decorated career as an education journalist, Herold explores these pressing debates with expertise and perspective. Then, alongside Bethany Smith—the mother from his old neighborhood, who contributes a powerful epilogue to the book—he offers a hopeful path toward renewal. The result is nothing short of a journalistic masterpiece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593298190
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/23/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	94,181
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Benjamin Herold explores America’s beautiful and busted public education system. His award-winning beat reporting, feature writing, and investigative exposés have appeared in Education Week, PBS NewsHour, NPR, the Hechinger Report, Huffington Post, and the Public School Notebook. Herold has a master’s degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lives with his family. Learn more at www.benjaminherold.com.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
 
 
I’m furious and disappointed.
—Nika Robinson
 
 
The Robinson Family  Gwinnett COUNTY, Georgia  

Nika Robinson loaded her Nissan Altima with all the jeans and sweatshirts and toys her children had outgrown during the past year. It was the kind of bright August morning when you couldn’t help but feel good, with a rising summer sun already warming her dark brown arms. For months, everything had been a struggle, leaving Nika drained and irritable, a shadow of her usual bubbly self. But a looming change of season whispered on the breeze. The 2019–20 school year had just begun. So far, things had unfolded smoothly. A few hours earlier, Nika’s husband and teenage son had headed out the door for work and for school, sleepy and cute as they mumbled goodbye. Carter and Cassidy, suddenly second and fourth graders, were happy and laughing as they ate their cereal at the kitchen island. Now, with her schedule free for the first time in forever, Nika felt almost relaxed. The end-of-summer consignment sale at the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds was about to start. It would be like a little reward for keeping everyone intact.

Nika climbed into the driver’s seat and slid forward. At just over five feet tall, she stood a full twelve inches shorter than her husband, Anthony

Robinson, once a lean and powerful high school linebacker, now built more like a bulky defensive tackle. The two had met in 2003, when they were in their early twenties, back when nearby Atlanta still had space for all the pent-up hopes of America’s booming Black middle class. At the time, she had just earned her master’s degree in public health. He was working as a network engineer. After they got married, there wasn’t much debate. Upwardly mobile families like theirs lived in the suburbs. By 2012, the Robinsons had settled in a six-bedroom, three-bathroom, $223,000 house in one of the whitest parts of northern Gwinnett, forty-five minutes from downtown.

Nika still wanted to believe it had been the right decision. Now in her early forties, it had become habit to push any nagging doubts about the life she’d built below the surface of her busy days, which were typically filled with work, parenting, and courses in the doctoral program she’d recently started at the University of Georgia. Just that morning, Nika had caught her self staring again at the dining-room walls, which remained the same neutral beige as the day they’d moved in. Weeks earlier, she and Anthony had bought several shades of blue paint in the small sample-size cans, then put a series of squares on the wall, one row running from Blueprint to Gentle- man’s Gray, another from Van Cortland to Indigo Batik. But even after hiring a color consultant to offer advice, Nika felt unable to commit.

It was a problem for another time, she thought as she backed her car out into the cul-de-sac, then passed her neighbors’ homes, their still-skinny front-yard trees and empty concrete driveways spaced at regular intervals. The condominium complex for active adults scrolled by, followed by the community’s gated pool and fenced-in tennis courts. Everything was calm. As they so often did, Nika’s thoughts circled back to her oldest son, Corey.

Now fourteen, he was a bowling ball of a boy, short and stout, with a complexion like hers. A running back. He’d just started ninth grade at Mill Creek High, widely regarded as one of the best schools in the county. It was a big reason she and Anthony had picked the house and neighborhood they did.

A favorite daydream returned after a long absence. Where might her son go to college? What would he study? Where would he work, live, raise a family of his own? Nika let her mind roam over the possibilities. She’d grown up in Buffalo, New York, then gone to undergrad in Rochester before making the big jump to Emory University in Atlanta for her master’s. Corey was more likely to go to a historically Black college, she figured. Just like his father, who studied math and physics at Clark Atlanta. Nika could already picture her baby boy in his gown, holding his degree, posing for pictures.

It was good to feel such ease again. For much of the summer, the Backpack Incident had been replaying on an endless loop in her mind. Thanks to Corey’s adolescent relationship with the truth and her own contentious relationship with the Gwinnett County Public Schools, Nika had limited visibility into the details of what had actually happened. But it clearly signaled a dangerous escalation. The trouble had started soon after Corey began seventh grade at Jones Middle School. First, it was a series of citations and detentions handed out by white teachers who complained that he was disrespectful and took too long in the bathroom. Nika and Anthony weren’t the type of parents to kid themselves. They knew their son was loud and liked to clown around. They got on him about moderating his volume, watching his manners, regulating his tone, tempering his physicality. But then Jones staff classified an accidental collision between Corey and another boy as “Behav phys inj,” a code that fell under the district’s rules for assault and battery. It was while trying unsuccessfully to get that removed from her son’s record that Nika heard about the Backpack Incident. By now, the spotty details she’d pieced together fell like dominos in her mind. The white boy who had reported a missing necklace. The school police officer who had searched the bags of Corey and another Black student. The teachers who didn’t bother to call home. The lack of an apology after the necklace couldn’t be found.

Before things could get any worse, Nika had pulled Corey out of Jones Middle and sent him to live with Anthony’s parents in neighboring DeKalb County for the rest of seventh grade. She also began researching a private Christian academy that reminded her of the private school she’d attended as a teenager back in Buffalo. But Anthony was cautious about money, and Corey wanted to be with his friends for eighth grade, so Nika had let the matter drop.

During those first few months back at Jones, her daydreams of college were crowded out by fears that Corey might end up in Gwinnett County’s notorious disciplinary school, the GIVE Center. If that happened, what would be next? Dropping out? Prison?

But the call never came.

Still, for much of the past summer, the family had argued again about private school. Nika wanted to make the transition for ninth grade, before Corey became attached to a new group of friends. She scheduled interviews with the school’s academic adviser, even arranged for her son to work out with the football team. But Anthony was torn. They were already paying al- most $4,000 a year in property taxes so they could send their children to the best public schools in Gwinnett County. How did paying more than $12,000 a year in tuition on top of that make sense? And what about Cassidy and Carter? Would they have to go to private school too?

Grudgingly, Nika had relented, again. Mill Creek High enrolled nearly 3,700 students. Three fourths scored proficient or advanced in both reading and math. The morning of Corey’s first day, Nika had been worried sick.

To her relief, though, things seemed to be going great. Corey had already made the JV football team. He was also taking Geometry, putting him ahead of most other freshmen in the state. And he had quickly become Mr. Popularity, attracting a wide cross section of friends with his constant jokes. When her son came home from those first few days of school smiling and relaxed, Nika finally exhaled. Now she began to chastise herself just a bit. Perhaps she was being overprotective, Nika thought as she neared the turn-off for the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds. Too focused on the negative, ungrateful for the blessings her family enjoyed. Maybe the dots she’d been connecting into the shape of some systemic problem really were just a series of unrelated incidents.

She parked the Altima and climbed out of her seat. The midday sun wrapped her in a warm embrace. Back when Gwinnett was mostly rural and white, the sprawling fairgrounds complex had been home to rodeos and livestock competitions. Now it hosted a steady stream of craft fairs and dog shows.

Nika gathered her things and headed inside, joining a throng of middle- class moms who were African American and Korean American and Nigerian American and Mexican American and multiracial and white. She drifted through 9,600 square feet of floor space that filled up each year with Spider-Man T-shirts and Lego bins and a small army of Frozen snowmen who stared goofily at passersby. Nika found the smartly organized totems of childhood soothing. Everything where it belonged. Smiling, she began hanging her family’s old clothing on the for-sale racks.

Then her phone buzzed in her purse. It was one of Mill Creek’s assistant principals. He’d just handed Corey a long suspension. Nika would later learn that her son had been slap-boxing in the locker room with a teammate, more horsing around than trying to hurt each other. But someone had recorded the boys jumping around, and a bunch of laughing students had crowded around a cell phone to watch, drawing the attention of administrators who classified what happened as a fight. Nika heard the assistant principal say the harsh punishment he’d meted out was partly a result of her son’s past disciplinary record, which included the prior “assault” charge she’d been unable to get expunged from his record. Everything mooring Nika to the present moment seemed to dissolve.

Inside the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds, surrounded by sneakers and strollers and exersaucers, she began to shake. A wave of anger crashed over her, then receded, only to be replaced by something like grief. She burst into tears. A stranger had to help her back to her car. Nika forgot all about the clothes and toys she’d come to sell, leaving them in a pile on the floor.
“I’m furious and disappointed,” she told me later. “I should have sucked it up and paid to send him to the school I thought would be a better fit.”

Editorial Reviews

11/06/2023

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

An important, cleareyed account of suburban boom and bust, and the challenges facing the country today. . . . each suburb’s history is engrossing, and Herold, a journalist who has frequently reported on public education, delivers an up-close, intimate account of life there that resounds with broader meaning. The families also reflect the expanding range of people who now call American suburbs home.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“This intrepid inquiry into the unfulfilled promise of America’s suburbs posits that a ‘deep-seated history of white control, racial exclusion, and systematic forgetting’ has poisoned the great postwar residential experiment. . . . Herold, a white journalist raised in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh suburb, peels back layers of structural racism, granting that ‘the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier were linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who lived there now.’” —The New Yorker

“Powerful . . . In a timely narrative, Herold draws attention to a morally urgent problem while offering a possible route toward revival.” —The Washington Post, Best New Books for January

“A blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development that ‘functioned like a Ponzi scheme’ . . . [Herold’s] portraits of families are nuanced and moving . . . The patterns are clear and continuing.”  —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Thoughtful, informative, and very disturbing . . . deserves a wide audience.” —Booklist

“Disillusioned breaks open the quiet racial injustice eating away at the heart of American suburbs. Shattering the myth of upward class mobility through meritocracy, Disillusioned shows us how white supremacy disenfranchises POCs even as they fulfill the requirements of the American suburban middle class dream—and how even white people, the intended beneficiaries of that dream, are starting to wonder if it’s a dream they can still afford to believe in. But whether the suburbs are integrated or predominantly white, people  of color still face the legacy of segregationist violence as they seek to provide their children with the suburban educations that a middle class income has for so long promised Americans. A necessary read for everyone in an American suburb today.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times-bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop

“Not only is Disillusioned engaging—riveting, really—it strikes at the very heart of the geography and emotional economy of race in the United States. ‘The suburbs’ are such a potent symbol and reality of the nation, and race is at the very center of their meaning, creation, and transformation. For decades now, we have lived with the myth that the suburbs are the centerpiece of the American Dream and that school integration is a simple matter of putting different races of children in the same well-maintained building in a bucolic setting. Disillusioned challenges us to be far more rigorous and honest in our accounts of race, place and community. An essential text in a challenging time.” —Imani Perry, New York Times-bestselling author of South to America, winner of the National Book Award

“With Disillusioned, Benjamin Herold delivers a powerful account of the intersection of race, housing, education, and injustice in America. Through the moving stories of five American families, Herold illuminates how segregation, white flight, and chronic underinvestment conspire to deny a new, diverse generation of suburbanites the brass rings of financial prosperity and emotional security. What’s more, he weaves in his family’s suburban journey and his personal reckoning with the impact of race and class in his own life and his perceptions of the lives of others to craft an invaluable, irreplaceable report. Honest, nuanced, and searing, Disillusioned is a book educators, parents, school board members, researchers, and anyone concerned with racial equity in America's schools should read.” —John B. King, Jr., former U.S. Secretary of Education and Chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY)

“Equal parts compelling, revealing, disquieting, and necessary, Disillusioned challenges us to update our mythologies about suburbs as enchanted utopias with magical schools eagerly waiting to ably educate all who walk through their doors. Benjamin Herold reminds us that place and community mean, do, and become different things when refracted through the prisms of wealth, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism. Necessary reading for all who want to understand the past and present as a starting point for forward progress, the insights, stories, and people in this book will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.” —Noliwe Rooks, chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and author of Cutting School
 
“A well-informed, ambitious narrative about the simmering inequities in American suburbs . . . Herold adeptly manages the sprawling storytelling . . . with empathy, varied scenes, and well-rounded characterizations. A deeply valuable study of the decline of suburbia.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Eye-opening . . . Herold’s portrayals are fine-grained and attentive to the conflicts that pervade interactions between parents and educators . . . An illuminating account of a poorly understood crisis currently facing America’s public schools.” —Publishers Weekly

“In Disillusioned, Ben Herold meticulously rips open myths that lie at the heart of the American dream—that geography is destiny, and that the forces driving inequity in society can be escaped rather that engaged. In this brilliant, compelling, and highly moving work, Herold shows us how the paths to suburbia are too often paved in fool's gold, in as much as the drivers of unequal educational outcomes there also impact schools and economies here. Herold’s page-turning narrative empathically reveals the lengths to which parents go to assure better futures for their children—while at the same time exposing the precarity of the larger American educational system. And he teaches us, yet again, that the promise of America must be addressed everywhere for it to be realized anywhere. This book is required reading for anyone who cares about our children and their collective futures.” —Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness

“Every once in a while, a book reorients your perspective and sense of place and privilege. Disillusioned did that for me.” —Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of In Search of the Color Purple

“There have been many memorable books about America's cities. Yet this nation's suburbs have alternately been ignored or reduced to a cartoonish stereotype—lawnmowers, strip malls, social conformity—even by serious artists and intellectuals. So Ben Herold's Disillusioned arrives as a blast of incisive analysis and narrative force. His five families occupy the very real world where the exposed wires of race, class, development, and deterioration cross and set off crackling sparks. This is the definitive account of the promises and betrayals of the suburban dream.” —Samuel G. Freedman, Columbia University professor of journalism and author of Small Victories

"It is such an odd thing, really, to be somewhere—and this 'somewhere' is the suburb both Ben and I lived in—without sidewalks. It felt alien when I was a 16 year old whose parents just moved out there from the city, in search of a better and safer future for their son. And it still feels, for lack of a better term, thoroughly f**ked up now. What Ben does, so passionately, so rigorously, and so personally, in Disillusioned, is make plain why Like why would an entire municipality be engineered to be unwalkable? And after he asks, and answers, so many of the terrible and meticulous and intentional whys, he asks and answers 'Who?'
 
“I'm not telling you to immediately read this book. Instead, if you happen to be in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and you find yourself in Penn Hills, I want you to try to cross a street." —Damon Young, author of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker and host of the "Stuck with Damon Young" podcast

“Benjamin Herold makes clear that our racially exclusionary past continues to contaminate the present and will do so until we can confront it with honesty. His sobering analysis of the disinvestment which follows the diversifying of American suburbs, enlivened by the compelling narratives of families in search of an elusive American dream, is a good place to start.” —Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race

From the Publisher

★ 2023-11-14
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.

Kirkus Reviews