About the Disillusioned (Hardcover Book)

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 the author grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his.

Education journalist Benjamin Herold braids these human stories together with local and national history to make Disillusioned an astonishing reading experience—and an urgent argument that suburbia and its schools are locked in a devastating cycle that has brought America to a point of crisis. 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. Now, though, rapidly shifting demographics and the reality that endless expansion is no longer feasible are disrupting that pattern. Forced to face truths that their communities were built to avoid, everyday suburban families suddenly find themselves at the center of the nation’s most pressing debates: How do we confront America’s troubled history? How do we build a future in which all children can thrive?

In exploring these questions, Herold pulls back the curtain on suburban public schools and school boards, which he argues are the new ground zero in the fight to revive the country’s faltering promise. Then, alongside Bethany Smith—the mother from his old neighborhood, who contributes a powerful epilogue to the book—Herold offers a path toward renewal. The result is nothing short of a journalistic masterpiece.