Join us at Third Presbyterian Church to listen to Benjamin Herold talk about his latest book, Disillusioned, with Bethany Smith. Limited free parking and disabled* parking is available in the church parking lot. Additional parking is available in the Walnut Street parking lots and parking garage, 2 blocks away.
*If you need a handicapped parking space at the event, please email olivia@riverstonebooks.com. We will have 8 spaces available on a first come, first served basis.
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, 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.
It once seemed so obvious that the American Dream was fractured in the cities we'd abandoned and the rural outposts we’d forgotten. That's why I began my career as a journalist in Philadelphia, where my coverage of mass school closings earned me recognition as the nation’s top education beat reporter. Later, at Education Week, my award-winning features and investigations took me from the sweet potato farms of central Mississippi to the sagging trailer parks of western Colorado in search of the source of the country's troubles.
But the conventional wisdom is wrong. My first inkling of this came in 2015, when a flood of devastating headlines began pouring out of my hometown, an aging inner-ring suburb ten miles east of downtown Pittsburgh. After running up a staggering $172 million debt, the same school district that had once served my white family so well was suddenly on the verge of collapse, threatening the hopes and dreams of thousands of Black families who'd come to suburbia in search of the same generous social contract that had made my comfortable middle-class life possible.
I wrote Disillusioned because suburbs like Penn Hills are the new front lines in the fight to realize America's promise. For far too long, the American Dream has been tethered to whiteness, lifting the fortunes of some by excluding, exploiting, and punishing others. But this pattern cannot and will not last forever. I'm grateful to those who have paid such a dire price to sustain other visions of what's possible, and I'm proud to dedicate my work to accountability, healing, and repair.
About the 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 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.
About the Conversation Partner:
Bethany Smith is an entrepreneur who champions public education through a fellowship with Education Voters of Pennsylvania. She helped author the critically acclaimed book Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs, which shares pieces of her life.
About the Moderator:
Jillian Forstadt is an education reporter at 90.5 WESA, Pittsburgh's NPR News station. Her work focuses on the intersection of education, equity and social justice, shedding light on the region's school systems. Before moving to Pittsburgh, she covered affordable housing, homelessness and rural health care at WSKG Public Radio in Binghamton, New York. Her reporting has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition.