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

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.)