Benjamin Herold, author portrait
© Naomieh Jovin

Benjamin Herold

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.
Disillusioned

Books

Disillusioned

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2024-25

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2024-25 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 340 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this

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2025 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2025! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about science, technology, history, student success, the environment, public health, and current events, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages,

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Author Benjamin Herold discusses teaching Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs

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

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned

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. Disillusioned braids 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

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