The report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.��

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as .��

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a to take advantage of — a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered “hazardous” or “undesirable” typically housing people of color, was more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including , still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.

While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, “carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.”

“Public schools must be ‘,’ and … if you look at the system we have across the country, you can see that we are falling so far short of that — and the primary reason for that is that we assign kids to schools based on their address,” DeRoche said. 

The report used Public School 19 and Public School 16 as examples. Both schools are in the north Bronx’s school District 11 and are located about a mile from one another — a 20-minute walk — but serve contrasting populations.

The Bronx

Attendance zone boundaries for P.S. 19 “mirror, almost perfectly, the area deemed to be ‘desirable’ by the racist redlining map drawn by federal government bureaucrats in 1938,” the report said. Whereas P.S. 16’s boundaries fell directly in a declining area, according to the 1938 map.

The remnants of redlining are echoed in both schools’ data — where P.S. 19 educates a population that is 43% Black and Latino and two-thirds low income, with 62% reading proficiency. That compares to P.S 16’s 88% Black and Latino student body, 95% of whom are low income with grade level reading just over 30%.

Schools like P.S. 19 “become almost quasi-private schools,” DeRoche said.

There were many examples across the New York City Public Schools system, as well as several upstate school districts.

Manhattan

Queens

“It’s really hard to find a place [in New York] that’s not segregated or a school district that’s not experiencing either racial segregation or some sense of class segregation,” said Kris DeFilippis, a former assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, who is now a clinical professor at New York University. “Not much has changed. … Wherever those lines were drawn [in the 1930s], it has largely stayed the same, unless there’s been a movement toward gentrification.”

In Albany, New York’s capital, New Scotland Elementary School was zoned over neighborhoods identified as desirable in 1938. The school serves a student population that is less than half Black or brown (41%) and low-income (47%) with reading scores near 60%.��

Just about two miles away at Giffen Memorial Elementary School, more than three-quarters of students are Black and Hispanic (84%) and qualify for free and reduced priced lunch (84%). Less than a quarter of students at Giffen Memorial read on grade level (21%).

Much of Giffen Memorial’s attendance zone lines up with 1938 redlining declining areas.

Albany

“You wouldn’t see these massive gaps [in demographics and student achievement] between two schools two miles away … if those two schools were truly open to kids,” DeRoche said. “The government has to be enforcing that in some way. How are they enforcing it? Well, they’re enforcing it with these maps. The kids on the wrong side of the line aren’t eligible to go to the public school that’s a mile [or two] from their home.”

In upstate New York, while there’s access to charter and magnet schools, school choice within a district is limited among traditional public schools. Students are generally required to go to the school in their attendance zone, “unless there are exceeding circumstances,” DeFilippis said, “but that is rare, it just doesn’t happen.”

In New York City, “it’s a bit different,” DeFilippis continued. Students typically attend a local elementary school before choice options open up in middle and high school grades across the metropolitan area  – creating its own challenges and limitations when it comes to admission to later grades.

“There’s almost like a false narrative that in New York City students can go where they want,” DeFilippis said, “but it’s not entirely accurate.”

For a student, traveling across the city to attend a school that works best for them can be difficult and it may also be challenging to get into competitive schools because they “haven’t had the same experiences at the lower grades that their peers have had,” DeFillipis said. So, ultimately, the current setup, “does not lead to equitable outcomes for Black and brown students, or low-income students, at all.”

The report recommended possible solutions for lawmakers to consider, such as decriminalizing address sharing, requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students who live outside the zone and allowing students to enroll in any public school within a three-mile radius of the child’s home.

The underlying principle, DeRoche said, is to “just decrease the link between where you live and which schools you’re allowed to attend.”

“These policies have been bad, not just for educational opportunity, but I think they’ve affected urban development and I think they’ve affected how our cities work and don’t work,” DeRoche said.

Yet in many ways Canfield Avenue Elementary School and Shenandoah Elementary School in the Beverlywood and Reynier Village neighborhoods of Los Angeles are worlds apart. 

Canfield’s student body is 46% white, while Shenandoah is 95% Black and Hispanic. Canfield has a pass rate of 77% on state reading exams, but just 31% of Shenandoah students met reading standards this year. 

The difference between these two schools isn’t about curriculum or funding, but rather the highly uneven attendance zones from which Canfield and Shenandoah draw their students.  

School attendance zones are meant to provide L.A. families with strong options for their children’s education. But a growing number of critics say the outdated school zones of LAUSD reinforce educational inequality by locking needy students out of a good education. 

Canfield’s residential school attendance zone is 83% white, while Shenandoah’s is 55% Hispanic, 14% Black, and 6% Asian, according to research conducted by The Urban Institute, a nonprofit think-tank. 

“Such massive inequities between neighboring schools, both within the same local public school system, are difficult to justify,” wrote Urban Institute researchers Tomas Monarrez and Carina Chien, who studied the two schools for their 2021 “Dividing Lines.”

The differences in the nearby schools’ catchment areas is reflected in their enrollment, with 49% of Canfield kids experiencing poverty, compared to 93% at Shenandoah. 

Monarrez and Chien found inequalities in school enrollment zones in districts across the country in their Urban Institute report, but singled out the racial segregation and uneven outcomes of LAUSD, the nation’s second-largest school district, for special attention. 

The entrenched and segregationist school zones that populate Los Angeles Unified are the deliberate outcomes of a racist past, according to local parent turned researcher-and-author Tim DeRoche.

DeRoche, whose book, “,” explores school zones and segregation in Los Angeles and other districts across the country, said attendance zones ought to be abolished or completely overhauled, but admits it’s unlikely that’ll happen anytime soon in L.A. 

“The district doesn’t want to touch them,” said DeRoche of LAUSD’s school zones, “because families overpaid for homes within those lines.”  

LA Unified officials say school attendance boundaries are shaped by a range of factors, including geography, enrollment trends, and school capacity. A district spokesperson saud boundaries are reviewed and adjusted as needed to support students and communities. 

According to conducted by Realtor.com, California has some of the largest public school real estate premiums in the U.S., with some of the most expensive school zones.

Home buyers may think the unequal nature of LA’s school zones is a consequence of a tight real estate market, DeRoche said, but at least eight LA elementary schools have school zones that closely mirror the racist, redlining maps of the 1930s, according to documents he recently unearthed. 

Redlining maps were developed by the federal government for use in mortgages and color-coded neighborhoods by their perceived investment risk. Areas with large numbers of Black residents were graded as “hazardous” and marked in red, leading to decades of disinvestment and segregation.  

For at least eight LAUSD schools, today’s student attendance boundaries match those of the discredited redlining maps nearly exactly. If a map of the school zone is placed atop a redlining map, the boundaries are the same. Attendance zones for many other schools match those of redlining maps partially. 

DeRoche made this startling discovery about LAUSD’s school zones while conducting an investigation of the district for his 2025 paper “,” which showed how lower- and middle-income families experience difficulty accessing top LAUSD elementary schools.

The use of school zones that mirror redlining maps occurs in public school districts across the country, but, in Los Angeles, it’s more prevalent than the national average, according to the research conducted by Monarrez and Chien for the Urban Institute.

Redlining isn’t the only vestige of America’s segregationist past that shows up in school zones. Across the country, modern school district boundaries of ,” where threats against Black people . 

Many of the school zones within LAUSD were drawn decades ago, and it’s unclear if those identified by DeRoche were drawn with the redlining maps in mind or not, he said. 

But it’s unlikely many parents of students enrolled in sought-after LAUSD elementary schools such as Ivanhoe Elementary, Mt. Washington Elementary and Mar Vista Elementary are aware that their school zones reflect those racist maps, DeRoche said. 

Nick Melvoin, a second-term LAUSD school board member whose district includes Mar Vista, said he wasn’t aware Mar Vista’s attendance zone mirrors that of an old, local redlining map, until DeRoche told him.  

The plain-spoken former attorney said he wasn’t surprised, though, given the history of exclusionary education policy in L.A. County, where Los Angeles Unified is but the largest of more than 70 local school districts.

“That is something that we don’t acknowledge,” said Melvoin. 

Throughout the county and over time, a number of districts that are surrounded by and adjacent to LAUSD have carved themselves out of the larger, more diverse district of LAUSD, “so that they have a little bit more exclusivity,” Melvoin explained.

That list, he said, includes Beverly Hills Unified, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified and Culver City Unified. 

In a perfect world, Melvoin said, maybe the attendance zone around Mar Vista in his own board district would be changed, but a better solution is to offer options that give families the choice to exit their local school zones and enroll in better options.

“I’d like a world where there are no enrollment boundaries, to really make sure that we’re equitable,” he said, “but where folks are still choosing their local schools, because we just have such a surplus of high quality options.” 

Some of the non-zone school options for LAUSD families include magnet schools, charter schools and schools in the district’s Open Enrollment platform, where families may enroll in schools outside their zones, as long as there are seats. 

An LAUSD spokesperson said 40% of students enrolled in schools outside their zoned area in the 2024-25 school year, reflecting the pervasiveness and efficacy of the district’s school choice programs. That’s up from 28% a decade ago, the spokesperson said.

Critics, including DeRoche, say the district’s programs still don’t do enough to provide good options for families.

DeRoche’s 2025 report found enrollment is down 46% among 456 LAUSD elementary schools from their peak, while over half of these schools have seen enrollment decline by over 50% over the last two decades. 

The decline has left a lot of open space in 39 high-performing schools, but that doesn’t mean LA students are filling them, according to DeRoche’s analysis. In fact, he and his team found nearly 7,000 empty seats in the sought-after schools. 

LAUSD officials disputed the analysis, saying its use of peak enrollment to measure school capacity is inaccurate, because those schools were overcrowded then.  

Melvoin said the district is working hard to make it easier for families to access schools outside their local zones, by providing its Open Enrollment platform to make it easier for families to enroll, and also by providing transportation for families that request it. 

“Now, throughout LA Unified in every grade level, families have other choices,” he said. Dual language and magnet programs, charters and schools of advanced studies are a few of the options available, he said. 

Beyond LA, a movement to promote school choice and eliminate dependence on zoned schools is gaining steam, said Derrell Bradford, president of the national education 50CAN.��

Bradford and his nonprofit are part of an alliance of more than 50 nonpartisan education groups committed to ending discriminatory public school district boundary lines, called the. 

The coalition argues that school boundaries are based on a student’s ZIP code and, de facto, a family’s wealth based on their home value. Formed last year, it has set a goal of ending the practice in all 50 states by 2030.

States, including Idaho, Nevada and Kansas, are already working to promote open enrollment with state laws that modify existing school zoning policies, said Bradford.

“Everything about how people think about where you go to school, and how you get into school is kind of up for public discussion right now, in a way that I think is helpful,” said Bradford. “Its time has come.”

The report, published Wednesday by the nonprofit watchdog group , finds that Missouri has some of the strictest school residential assignment policies in the nation. District attendance boundaries mirror historic racist housing redlining maps and are limiting student access to high-performing schools, said Tim DeRoche, the organization’s founder.

“Whenever the government assigns children to public schools, then the government also takes on the role of excluding those children from other public schools — that’s where the split starts to get problematic,” DeRoche said. “In Missouri, there’s just very strict assignment-based policies in districts. It’s very hard to cross district lines in Missouri as opposed to other states.”

Available to All’s report estimated that 94% to 96% of Missouri public school students attend their assigned school, based on their home address. State law has , such as if a student is homeless, parents pay property taxes at another location or a school loses accreditation. 

The lack of ability for students to easily transfer schools inside or outside their district encourages wealthy families to buy houses next to high-quality schools, DeRoche said. 

“It creates this very strict system where kids, especially low-income kids and low-income kids of color, get locked into struggling or failing schools, and the families have very few options to find another home for them,” he said.

DeRoche said the boundaries on redlining maps that were drawn a century ago to determine who got access to government-insured home mortgages largely correspond to the state’s school attendance lines. 

“Parts of towns that have high concentrations of people of color or immigrants or working-class folks are excluded” from receiving that sort of housing assistance, DeRoche said. “We found three examples where the school zone in Missouri overlaps or mirrors the pattern on redlining maps from 80 to 90 years ago.”

One school attendance boundary cited by the report runs north to south through St. Louis. Children living east of the line are assigned to the St. Louis City School District, where roughly 20% of students score proficient or better on state reading and math tests. Children located west of the line are assigned to Clayton School District, where nearly 75% of students are proficient or better on the same exams. The boundary, according to the report, “mirrors the pattern of the racist redlining map created by the federal government in 1937.”

In the St. Joseph School District, Field Elementary School — located near an area described as a “choice part of the city” in redlining maps — has significantly higher math and reading proficiency rates than Lindbergh Elementary School, located 2 miles away. The Lindbergh neighborhood was described in redlining maps as “a poor area and one which lenders avoid,” according to the report.

A 2024 analysis by New America, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C., found this line is among the 100 most segregating district borders in the nation in terms of poverty rate disparity among school-aged children.

Because of the steep inequality across district boundaries, DeRoche said, it’s not uncommon for parents to lie about where they live to give their child an education at a higher-performing school. Schools in Missouri — and across the nation, he said — often investigate students’ residences to find families that aren’t living within district boundaries. 

These inspections are conducted by school officials, teachers or even private investigators hired by the district, according to the Available to All report.

A by St. Louis Public Radio and Midwest Newsroom found the Hazelwood School District, which enrolls roughly 16,000 students in suburban St. Louis, performed 2,051 residency investigations during the 2022-23 school year. In 2018-19, the district conducted just 148.

Parents can be charged with a misdemeanor for falsifying their children’s enrollment records, according to

State Rep. Brad Pollitt has been trying to expand school choice in Missouri with open enrollment bills for the last five years. He reintroduced his proposal again this year in hopes it will finally make it to the state Senate floor. 

, the Public School Open Enrollment Act, would allow any K-12 student to attend a school in a nonresident district, depending on factors including disciplinary and attendance records, the school’s student-to-teacher ratio, class sizes and building capacity. Only 3% of a district’s students would be allowed to leave each year.

According to , the bill doesn’t require school districts to accept students living outside the area, but districts that do would receive extra funding.

DeRoche said Available to All recommends that Missouri require districts to enroll children from outside their boundaries when schools have space available. 

“School finance policies should ensure that education dollars can flow across district lines, enabling Missouri families to access the public schools that they feel are the right fit for their children,” the report says.

It also recommends that schools reserve a specific percentage of seats for students who live outside the district.

“There’s an opportunity for reform,” DeRoche said. “We don’t take a stand on individual bills, but there is a chance [to create] best practices in protecting equal access to public schools.”

In the first of its kind , researchers unveil troubling laws, loopholes and trends that undermine the legacy of Brown v. Board, in which the supreme court ruled “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Public schools today are not required to explain or prove why they are denying a student enrollment. Paired with pressure to stack classrooms with “easier to educate” kids, school administrators say this leads to practices of denying Black, brown, low-income students and those with disabilities enrollment to public school, without consequence.

The report argues discrimination has also been made widespread by allowing – and in four states, requiring – districts to use and enforce school attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing maps from the , separating children by home addresses. Schools contract with private investigators, prosecute or fine parents who defy zone lines via address sharing. Only one state, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice.

Researchers say the need to reform and undermine the weight home addresses have on educational outcomes is more urgent than ever, as many districts start to weigh closures and consolidations, leaving thousands of children, , hanging in the balance.

“You can’t be turned away from school because of your race, but if all of the Black people live on one side of the line, all the white people live on the other side of the line, it’s OK to draw the line and assign kids to school based on that,” said Tim DeRoche, coauthor of the report and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization.

In the wake of Brown, courts took charge, taking on dozens of cases and stamping out explicit racial segregation, particularly in the south. 

“But they never came back around to fulfill that promise, that public schools had to be available to all in equal terms,” DeRoche said. “There’s all these other ways that we sort kids into schools that give advantages to people who have money or live in the right part of town. The courts have just neglected to take that up and frankly, the legislatures have failed to take that up as well.”

The report makes the case for better legal protections, like requiring districts to operate open enrollment zones for families within a 3-mile radius, reserve seats for nonresidents, publish data on enrollment application and denials, and, when schools do reach capacity, require lotteries, common practice at public charter schools.

It also provides a legal profile for each state, outlining their stance on laws that govern public school admissions. In 36 states, for instance, families couldn’t appeal their public school assignment even if they wanted to; Arkansas and California are among the few to explicitly protect the right to appeal to a neutral party.

In Tampa, for example, a predominantly Black elementary school closed, its grade level reading proficiency rates at 11%. Instead of sending any of the few hundred students to the coveted school where 80% read at grade level minutes away from their homes, they were bused to poorer performing, majority minority schools further away, citing capacity constraints. 

“When you see school closures, the politics comes out. You can see the exclusion very clearly,” said DeRoche.

Low-income students, students of color and those with disabilities are those most often excluded. “Thereʼs this systemic pressure to sort of stack your school with kids who are easier to educate,” said a former administrator cited in the report.

Certain students — unhoused, migrant, incarcerated students or those with disabilities or in foster care — are supposed to be protected from enrollment discrimination by federal law, allowed to continue attending original schools in the event of moves. 

Still, the vast majority of decisions lay in the hands of administrators, whose admission practices fly under the radar, unrequired to publish data or provide written reasoning. “In some states with strong open enrollment laws, such as Arizona and Wisconsin, districts are allowed to use unverified claims of capacity constraints to keep children with disabilities from enrolling,” the report states.

As one school psychologist with Los Angeles Unified described to ����Ӱ��, “I’ve seen [zones] weaponized, too … used more as a tool to get rid of students that are engaging in more problem behavior. ‘Well, their address isn’t even in our residence.’”

The school psychologist, speaking on condition of anonymity, witnessed kids get turned away about 15 times this school year. Some common reasons given to families — always verbally, never written — is that their school is full of capacity, can’t accommodate the student’s IEP, or, in one case, “we don’t enroll in April.”

A few times, students were pushed out after mentioning moves offhand to teachers who said, “well, you cause too much havoc in my classroom. So I’m gonna let somebody know.” Some were able to stay because parents were “more assertive,” in meetings with administrators, who then backed off. 

“A lot of the parents don’t know their rights – some of them are just trying to survive so they don’t have the time to go fight the district and be like, ‘oh, my kid’s not being enrolled.’ These families get taken advantage of more often.”

Such was the case in the four counties around Philadelphia, where a public radio investigation revealed the hundreds of kids kicked out of the districts each year for residency fraud were overwhelmingly . Pennsylvania does not have any law or process set for families who want to appeal admissions decisions.

But changing district attendance zone lines is no easy feat.

In , parents flooded houses within the zone for sought-after Lincoln Elementary. When the district considered withdrawing boundary lines, parents were outraged and plans fizzled. Ultimately the state allocated $20 million for the school to build an annex and add more seats, even though hundreds sat empty at schools in the neighborhood. 

“They’re trying to protect these families who feel like, ‘oh, I’ve already paid for my kids’ school via my mortgage,’” said DeRoche. 

Available to All presents an alternative: even if attendance zones were redrawn, other protections like laws to require 15% of seats be reserved for nonresident families or using a lottery once seats are filled, wouldn’t force middle- or higher- income families out of quality schools they’ve invested in via housing. 

Lines were not redrawn; Lincoln Elementary only became more accessible for the wealthy, predominantly white families who could afford to live in the attendance zone.

“[Educational redlining] is a part of the fabric of our lives and we all kind of take it for granted. We’re just trying to call it out and make people look at it straight in the face.” 

Disclosure: Stand Together provides financial support to Available to All and ����Ӱ��. Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

The aims to end what it calls “discriminatory public school district boundary lines” in all 50 states by 2030. 

Members say past efforts to address this issue are weak and ineffective. allowed students to transfer within their school district, while 19 and the District of Columbia permitted them to transfer elsewhere. But many programs are voluntary on the part of receiving schools. Some require a sign-off from a student’s home school district or charge tuition for families seeking to make a switch.

Many do not allow parents to appeal a decision.

“The existing open enrollment laws are deeply flawed and limited,” said Tim DeRoche, president of Available to All, a coalition member. “They are circumscribed in very deliberate ways in many, many states.”

Proponents of robust open enrollment laws tout of 1,000 people from across the nation that showed two-thirds favored allowing a child to attend any public school in the state. The notion was particularly appealing to Black respondents: 76% favored the idea. 

A Charles organization called ., which pushes for expanding learning opportunities, including school choice, is leading the effort. Coalition members discuss the issue with policymakers and publish examining state laws that criminally prosecute parents for using addresses other than their own to enroll their children in public school. 

They also explain how states can address the lasting impacts of redlining, a decades-old practice that branded some communities as financially risky — a label linked to current education disparities and zoning restrictions. 

Jorge Elorza, chief executive officer of Democrats for Education Reform, another coalition member, said children should be free to pursue their education in schools that meet their needs.

“It comes down to expanding the options that families have over the schools they have access to,” he said. 

To that end, for example, is working with lawmakers in South Carolina to advance . 

, the group’s chief operating officer, noted, too, that Idaho recently widening the opportunity for children to attend schools of their choosing. 

Currently, parents in that state must apply for a transfer, with priority given to those who wish to switch within their home district. School officials may deny such a request if the student had been expelled, has a history of significant disciplinary issues or was chronically absent, or if the new district does not have capacity. 

Challenges against zoning rules have arisen in other parts of the country as well, including in New Jersey, where the Latino Action Network and NAACP, among others, in 2018. They cited residency requirements that often keep Black and Latino students in subpar schools. A judge rendered a on the case last fall.

Opponents of open enrollment laws fear they could drain low-performing schools of their best students, but coalition members say that not all families whose children attend troubled schools seek to switch, even when given the chance. 

Students who feel loved and supported by their educators often stay, Jedynak said. But, she added, simply having strong open enrollment policies forces public schools to improve or specialize in order to attract students.. 

Public schools in Arizona, which have among the least restrictive open enrollment policies in this country, for students for years. 

, president of 50CAN, another coalition member, recalls his mother and grandmother trying to devise a way to get him into a better middle school outside their southwest Baltimore zone. 

His aunt, a teacher in the city schools, knew how to navigate a pathway to a better education, and Bradford ultimately tested into a magnet school. But not all children have relatives who understand the system. 

“This is a hidden but treacherous problem that many American families are navigating all the time,” he said. “It is widely known and understood, but rarely talked about.” 

Bradford said school choice is most often available for the lucky and the rich, including those families who can afford homes in wealthy neighborhoods with high-performing schools. The remainder are often left behind, with some opting to break the law for their children — a choice that can bring about dire consequences. 

can land parents, friends and family members in jail. Kelley Williams-Bolar, for example, in 2011 for sending her two young daughters to a school they were not zoned to attend outside Akron, Ohio. 

She said parents should not be penalized for trying to secure a better future for their children. 

“This is not malicious, trying to steal, trying to do something horrific,” she said, adding that many people in her community face the same dilemma. “I don’t know a parent yet who would say it’s OK for (their children) not to get all of the fundamentals they need. Everyone wants their child to have the best education.”

If that means upending rules that have governed admissions for generations, that’s fine, she said. 

“It’s time to go back in, re-evaluate and make change,” she said.

Disclosure: yes. every kid. is a grantee of the Stand Together network. Stand Together Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Stand Together Trust, Walton Family Foundation and Nellie Mae Education Foundation provide financial support to 50CAN and The 74. Campbell Brown sits on 50CAN’s board of directors. Brown co-founded ����Ӱ�� and sits on its board of directors.

Staring down the nearly 80-year history of modern suburbia, Herold finds that the effort produced mostly “disposable communities” across the country. While they served their first few sets of residents — his family included — they have failed to deliver the promise of the American Dream to the families of color who followed. Case in point: He notes that in the north of Dallas, where his reporting takes him, Black mortgage loan applications are now denied at a rate 23 percentage points higher than those of white applicants with similar incomes.

And while many families sought suburban homes in large part for their superior schools, even that isn’t a given anymore, he finds — especially if you’re not white or born in the U.S.A. Instead of an educational upgrade, he reports, many families now find troubled, underfunded schools, intractable bureaucracies, teachers’ union contracts that make “any wholesale changes difficult” and, perhaps worst of all, maddening discrimination in the very place where they’d sought refuge.

A longtime Education Week staffer who now teaches journalism at Temple University, Herold spent four years examining the historical record and found a pattern: As suburbs age, municipal revenues often fall, even as the costs of maintaining infrastructure rise. An “entrenched culture of political backscratching and can-kicking” exacerbates these problems.

In one suburban district in Evanston, Ill., outside of Chicago, crusading superintendent Paul Goren tells Herold, “I landed in a district that had a foundation of quicksand. It was wobbly on the instructional side, with lots of people doing their own thing because that was what they had done for years. We were [also] facing some level of financial doom.”  

Eventually, Herold writes, what befell so many suburbs was what he calls a “relentless cycle of racialized development and decline that took root after World War II, then sucked huge swaths of the country into a pattern of slash-and-burn development that functioned like a Ponzi scheme.”

His book, out Tuesday, follows five diverse families in suburban Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. He actually grew up in the Penn Hills neighborhood east of Pittsburgh, and finds one of his subjects just three doors down from his childhood home.

Herold spent years getting to know these families, offering a deeply reported and closely observed account of five families’ struggles to capture what his family so easily enjoyed. 

����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo caught up with Herold earlier this month.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: You note at the outset that you’re a suburban kid, raised in Penn Hills. Things for you went as they were supposed to. Yet you report that your dad ended up selling your childhood home in 2014 for one-fourth of what it was worth, to a guy he met on Craigslist. Is this the inevitable fate of inner-ring suburbs like yours? What’s at play here? Why don’t suburbs work anymore, and how do public schools play a part in this failure?

Benjamin Herold: Suburbia worked great for my middle-class white family and millions of others like us who received guaranteed mortgage loans, massive tax breaks and sparkling new infrastructure, including public schools we got decades to mold in our own image. But all that was made possible by trading short-term wealth for massive debts and liabilities that we pushed off on to future generations. Eventually, the bills come due. That’s what we’re seeing now.

You write that America’s suburbs since World War II have resembled a kind of Ponzi scheme that has stuck later investors with the bill. So we’re in the “after” part of the cycle, right?

All too often, it’s newer suburban families of color who get stuck paying for all the opportunity that whiter and wealthier families like mine already extracted. Because this cycle plays out over large geographies and multiple generations, it can be difficult to recognize when we take snapshots of a single suburban community at a single point in time. That’s why I followed five families living in five suburban communities that are each at a different stage of this process.

It’s also why public schools are such a valuable lens — we can only really see the bigger picture when we pay close attention to the anger, frustration and disillusionment that so many suburban parents feel when they’ve done everything right, yet still have to deal with their children being called racial slurs, subjected to unfair discipline and denied access to opportunities like gifted programs.

Just three doors down from your old house in Penn Hills, you knock on a door and find one of your five subjects: Bethany Smith, a Black woman who bought the place with her mother. That Bethany’s experience is so different from your family’s seems to reveal what you’re getting at in the book. Tell us about her. [Note: Herold uses pseudonyms for all of his subjects with the exception of Smith, who writes the book’s epilogue.]

Bethany’s family and mine wanted the same things: a quiet street, good public schools, homes that steadily increase in value, systems and services that just work. The difference is that my white family got most of those things without paying full price, while Bethany’s family had to pay extra to receive declining services, a school district that was raising taxes and slashing services and a stagnant housing market. 

Your subjects — almost all of whom are people of color — seem in many ways left to their own devices when it comes to pursuing these dreams in mostly crumbling, formerly white suburbs. What should communities be doing differently to help these families?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s why: In suburban Atlanta, I followed a middle-class Black family named the Robinsons. Both parents have advanced degrees, good jobs, rich social networks, and a strong spiritual foundation. Both also unabashedly love learning. Nika, the mom, was pursuing her PhD in public health, and Anthony, the dad, was a network engineer and former middle school teacher who stayed up late each night re-teaching geometry concepts to his teen son. Both parents were extremely active in their children’s schools, volunteering in the library, going to every parent-teacher meeting and maintaining running email correspondence with their kids’ teachers. And both Nika and Anthony are extremely kind and funny to boot. So for me, the question becomes: How on earth does a well-regarded system like the Gwinnett County Public Schools not only fail to connect with a family like the Robinsons, but actively alienate them, by gradually whittling away their oldest son’s spirit, joy, and sense of self, despite the abundant resources, assets and gifts the Robinsons bring with them?

So how can we understand the Robinsons’ experience through your lens of suburban decline instead of incompetence at the school level?

By 2019, Gwinnett County was nearly two-thirds Black, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial. But in many ways, the Gwinnett County Public Schools operated as if it were still the early 1990s, when the population it served was still 90 percent white. During the period I write about, this was evident in big racial disparities in school discipline and access to gifted programs; Black and brown children now made up about two-thirds of all the district’s students, but barely one-third of the kids the district identified as gifted and talented.

Above all, though, this dynamic was evident in the district’s leadership. Prior to 2018, Gwinnett had somehow never elected a person of color to its five-member school board, which was largely controlled by three older white women, one of whom had held her seat for 47 years, and all of whom were vocal in their beliefs that changing the way things had always been in order to reflect the priorities and values of a changing population was tantamount to diluting the quality of the education the district offered. There was plenty of incompetence, but it occurred within the larger context of a $2.3 billion organization with policies, practices, and personnel that too often showed flagrant disregard for the majority of families it served. 

Eventually, things start to fall apart for nearly all of your subjects, it seems. Even the Beckers, a conservative and affluent white family, ultimately give up on the public schools in their exclusive Dallas exurb after a single year. They end up in a private Christian academy in a Plano strip mall. That makes me wonder: Is at least some of the “unraveling” you’re describing just the messiness of life, parent restlessness writ large?

I approached writing Disillusioned from two angles. I wanted to illuminate a big economic, social, and political pattern that we all now live within because America is such a suburban nation. I also wanted to explore the choices everyday families make and the lives we build as we try to figure out our relationship to that pattern. So I don’t think the Beckers’ relentless search for better schools is separate or distinct from the cycle of suburban churn they’re trying to navigate. As with the rest of us, these larger forces help determine the available options, and the choices we make in turn help shape those larger forces. 

You note throughout the book that Black and brown students have always had a fraught relationship with their suburban schools: “For so long,” you write, “so much of suburbia had been organized around trying first to keep those kids out, then treating them as a problem to be managed.” Yet in Compton, Calif., which is now almost entirely Black and brown, you find a measure of promise. Can you say more?

Jefferson Elementary in Compton is housed in a ramshackle facility consisting of several rundown bungalow buildings with narrow slits for windows that are almost reminiscent of a prison. But what I saw inside Jefferson and Compton Unified was a multiracial collection of adults — including a Black superintendent and school board chair, a Filipino principal, and a Latino fourth-grade teacher whose classroom I followed — who were unflagging in their belief that Compton’s children were bursting with talent and deserved all the opportunities and supports the system could muster. 

One of my favorite little examples of this was a narrative essay the fourth-graders were asked to write. The kids had to describe what a typical day would look like if they worked at . A boy named Jacob, whose family I was following, wrote this incredible piece about designing new droids and prototyping new light sabers and having water-cooler conversations with George Lucas. Between assignments like that, after-school robotics clubs, the chance to create a class newspaper, engineering lessons through [a well-regarded STEM-focused curriculum], and a class-wide mock trial, the kids were flooded with opportunities to imagine themselves shaping America’s future. And Superintendent Darin Brawley was extremely intentional about this, at a very big-picture level — he recognized that his retirement and his own family’s progress would depend on how well he prepared the students in Compton Unified, and so he took that responsibility not just seriously, but personally.

Your idea to pay Bethany Smith, the Penn Hills mom, to write the book’s epilogue strikes me as a bold choice. She’s quite blunt, for the record, writing that white people “are always fucking some shit up, then expecting everybody else to go fix it.” Why, among all of your subjects, does she deserve the last word? After the century-long narrative you’ve woven, is this the message you want readers to take away?

I love Bethany’s epilogue. I think it’s just tremendous. I’m so grateful she agreed to write it, and I’m even more grateful she was willing to get really, really honest, even when doing so was painful for her and unflattering for me. 

A central question drove me to give four years of my life to this project. I wanted to know how the opportunities my white family enjoyed in Penn Hills a generation ago are connected to the declining fortunes of the families who live in Penn Hills now. And I think Bethany’s epilogue really helped capture and communicate the answer. But it took me a long-time to actually be able to really hear what she was saying, in part because I had to shed a lot of my own illusions.

The breakthrough came when I finally realized I had to engage these questions emotionally, not just intellectually. And that meant putting under a microscope my own experience as a white person who grew up in suburbia, reaped its benefits and left behind a mess so I could go build a comfortable life somewhere else. Doing that made the book much richer, and that was a direct result of the challenge Bethany issued to me. So I’m extremely thankful to her, and to all the families and educators featured in this book who helped create a space that allowed all of us to give as much of our hearts as we felt comfortable sharing. 

Disclosure: Benjamin Herold received support from at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Greg Toppo is a Spencer Fellowship board member.

In theory, the closure should have been good news for families whose children attend Just. There’s a great public school, Gorrie Elementary, about 2 miles away. At Gorrie, 80% of the kids read at grade level. For many Just families, Gorrie is much closer to home, so a reassignment there would mean a shorter commute, too.

But that’s not what happened. Like many elite urban elementary schools, Gorrie is full up with families who have crammed into the attendance zone. So the Just students got assigned to Tampa Bay Boulevard and Washington elementary schools, which have reading proficiency levels of 51% and 27%, respectively. For most of these families, their new school is further away than Gorrie.

The outcome was predictable. It is a pattern that plays out in almost all urban American districts.

In 2020, I published a about educational redlining and the coveted public elementary schools that are protected by attendance zones — places like Lincoln Elementary in Chicago, PS 8 Robert Fulton in Brooklyn, Lakewood Elementary in Dallas and Mount Washington Elementary in Los Angeles.

Gorrie shares all the telltale characteristics of these schools: full enrollment, demographics that skew wealthier and whiter than nearby schools, much higher rates of proficiency on state tests than the district average and homes that cost than those just outside the zone because they come with privileged access to a “free” high-quality public education.

My book features maps showing that the attendance zones of many of these schools mirror the racist redlining diagrams drawn during the New Deal era to determine who would (and wouldn’t) qualify for federal housing assistance. If you line up the Gorrie attendance zone with the from 1940, you’ll see that the school zone covers all the areas deemed to be “best” and “desirable” over 80 years ago.

It also boxes out almost all the areas of town that were shaded red and labeled “hazardous” because they had a high concentration of low-income people of color. Those areas are still low-income neighborhoods, and once again those families find themselves on the losing end of discriminatory government maps.

Those maps are not so easy to change.

Earlier this year, before the vote that closed Just Elementary, Superintendent Addison Davis of the Hillsborough County Public Schools released a rezoning plan developed by a high-end New York urban planning firm. His goal was to reduce costs by closing underutilized schools and assigning children to buildings closer to their homes. According to Davis, 44% of Hillsborough schools are underenrolled, while 24% are overenrolled — an imbalance that had contributed to the district’s ongoing . The projected capital savings of up to $160 million and annual savings of up to $30 million.

The plan, however, caused a huge public controversy. Many students at Plant High School — an overcrowded, high-performing school that serves many high-income families who live quite far away — would have been assigned to other, closer schools. But their , and Davis had to scrap his plans to redo the zone for Plant. The closure of Just Elementary, however, did pass, as there were so few parents left who would object to shutting a failing, half-empty school. Davis has since , perhaps a casualty of the bitter politics of his rezoning effort.

Similar tensions play out in my old neighborhood of Los Angeles. In northeast L.A., seven elementary schools surround coveted Mount Washington. Those seven schools saw average enrollment losses of 66% in the last 15 to 20 years. Meanwhile, Mount Washington saw enrollment increase by almost 40% in a little over a decade. Families have crowded into the Mount Washington zone, pushing housing prices even higher and making access impossible for students of modest means.

Such imbalances cannot go on forever, though. Since coveted schools can accommodate only so many students, and operating half-empty buildings around their perimeter is extremely expensive, districts are eventually forced to do something. Typically, they announce plans to redraw zoning lines. But, as happened with Plant, powerful parents and homeowners object, and school board members make extraordinary concessions to appease them. A number of districts have spent as much as $20 million to renovate a school to add more seats, even though there was a public school just down the road with plenty of room. At , and , officials approved millions in wasteful spending just to avoid upsetting parents who had already “paid for” access to a specific public school.

Before he resigned, Davis that he believed part of his job was to ensure that home values continue to go up. Of course, artificially inflated home prices are concentrated in the zones of the most coveted public schools — those protected by educational redlining. It’s astounding that school officials are proud that they contribute to the ongoing housing affordability crisis, which is exacerbated by the persistent use of exclusionary school zones.

Eventually, districts may move away from this archaic model of school assignment, since it violates fundamental American ideals of fairness and undermines the public schools’ noble purpose of providing every child with a fair shot at the American dream. When they do, they should look to the history of the community college system in California. For decades, the system relied on geographic assignment, and enrollment eroded, much as it has in urban K-12 districts.

Then, in 1987, a state commission recommended ending the geography-based system. The legislature agreed and opened up the colleges to all state students. Enrollment rebounded, and now the community college system is one of the most trusted institutions in the state.

School access needn’t be a zero-sum game governed by bitter political fights over maps.