In this richly reported book, he follows five families that sought comfort and promise in America’s suburbs over these past couple of decades, outside Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. In each of these communities, Herold zeroes in on the schools, in large part because education captures the essence of what attracted these families: the prospect of something better for their kids.

...an important, cleareyed account of suburban boom and bust, and the challenges facing the country today.

...presents a blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development 'that functioned like a Ponzi scheme'.

Through beautifully layered reporting, Herold argues that time and demographic change have created a novel disenchantment..

...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.

A well-informed, ambitious narrative about the simmering inequities in American suburbs.

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..