PRRAC — Connecting Research to Advocacy

Poverty & Race Research Action Council

PRRAC Publications & PRRAC Authors

Earlier Books and Articles

Poverty & Race in America: The Emerging Agendas. PRRAC’s 3rd “Best of Poverty & Race” volume, Chester Hartman, ed., foreword by Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. Featuring over six dozen pieces originally published in Poverty & Race between mid-2001 and 2005, with sections covering Race/Racism, Poverty, Education, Housing, Health, and Democracy. The 91 contributors to the collection represent the best of progressive thought and activism on America’s two most salient, and seemingly intractable, domestic problems.  Read the Table of Contents. 

Keeping the Promise: Preserving and Enhancing Housing Mobility in the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program: Final Conference Report of the Third National Conference on Housing Mobility (2005) (edited by Philip Tegeler, Mary Cunningham, and Margery Austin Taylor).

The Persistence of Segregation in Government Housing Programs (Philip Tegeler, chapter in The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America, Xavier de Souza Briggs, ed., Brookings Press). The book explores the many facets of metropolitan segregation and opportunity, and provides an excellent overview of the most important new research and policy work in this area.

A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda (Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, & Chester Hartman, eds., Temple Univ. Press)

Housing and School Segregation: Government Culpability, Government Remedies (2005) These three historical studies, by Arnold Hirch, Raymond Mohl, and David Freund, funded by a multi-year grant from the Ford Foundation, trace the development of federal housing and transportation policies in relation to increasing housing and school segregation in American metropolitan areas. These studies take a much closer look at the early decisions and policies within the federal bu=ureaucracy that have been broadly described in works like Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid.

Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching (PRRAC and Teaching for Change, 2004).  Interactive, interdisciplinary lessons, readings, photographs, primary documents, and interviews, with sections on education, labor, citizenship, culture, and reflections on teaching about the Civil Rights Movement. By putting the Movement back into civil rights teaching, we hope to help students find their connection to history and learn about the roles they can play in fighting injustice today. This publication challenges many of the myths about the Movement, making it clear, for example, that the Movement was made by thousands of people and organizations — not only a few exceptional heroes.   576 pages.

Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem (Chester Hartman and David Robinson of Legal Services for NYC, Housing Policy Debate (2003). The article reviews definitional issues, the available data on evictions — particularly as they affect lower-income and minority tenants — and model efforts to reduce the incidence and impact of evictions. The article ends with a call for developing a national database on evictions: who’s being evicted, for what reason, and what happens to evictees.

Fragmented: Improving Education for Mobile Students (Lynora Williams, with a foreword by Wendy Puriefoy of The Public Education Network, 2003). Drawing on the material from the Winter 2003 Journal of Negro Education (“Student Mobility: How Some Children Get Left Behind”), co-edited by PRRAC’s Founder/past Director of Research Chester Hartman, Fragmented outlines the specific classroom mobility issues faced by low-income and minority students, especially homeless, immigrant, farmworker, special ed and foster children; and provides a series of specific action steps to ameliorate this problem — drawn from “best practices” case studies from Chicago, Texas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Dept. of Defense schools.

False HOPE: A Critical Assessment of the HOPE VI Public Housing Redevelopment Program  (National Housing Law Project, PRRAC, Sherwood Research Associates, and ENPHRONT, 2003). Nearly a decade ago, the HOPE VI program was launched to address the most troubled portion of the public housing stock, the small percentage of public housing sites that were “severely distressed.” HOPE VI is a competitive grant program, under which public housing authorities (PHAs), local entities that administer federal housing programs, apply to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for funding to redevelop or demolish public housing sites. While it was intended to be a solution to severely distressed public housing, HOPE VI has been the source of new problems as serious as those it was created to address.

Student Mobility: How Some Children Get Left Behind (winter 2003 issue of The Journal of Negro Education, guest editors Chester Hartman (PRRAC Director of Research) and Todd Michael Franke (UCLA)). High student mobility is a serious, under-recognized education problem. Classrooms, particularly those in low-income and minority areas, may have 50-75% turnover within the academic year. Homeless, immigrant, farmworker, special education, and foster children are especially impacted. The major education reforms put forward — smaller classes and schools, lower teacher/student ratios, better-trained teachers, improved physical plant and facilities, increased emphasis on testing and accountability, etc. — all are undermined, if not made irrelevant, if the classroom is a revolving door. Stable students, teachers, administrators, and the school itself all suffer. This special issue of the JNE stresses the role of housing instability as the principal cause of school instability, focusing as well on internal school factors. Individual chapters treat the special conditions and needs of various student subpopulations affected. And a series of five “best practices” case studies — from Chicago, Minneapolis, Texas, California, and Department of Defense schools — illustrate the range of needed reforms. This pdf file includes an order form and the Table of Contents.

Millennial Misfire (Chester Hartman, Shelterforce 2002). Review of the Millennial Housing Commission’s report,  “Meeting Our Nation’s Housing Challenges.”

High Classroom Turnover: How Children Get Left Behind (May 2002) by Chester Hartman is a chapter appearing in Rights at Risk: Equality in an Age of Terrorism, the biannual report of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights. The Citizens’ Commission, chaired by PRRAC Board member William L. Taylor, issued, on Lincoln’s birthday (“Is the Republican Party still the party of Lincoln?”) the 7th in its series of biannual reports chronicling “the progress of the incumbent administration, executive branch agencies and Congress in carrying out both their moral and legal duties to end discrimination and advance civil rights and opportunities for all Americans.” The report, edited by Dianne M. Piche, William L. Taylor & Robin A. Reed, contains 21 chapters, covering education, the courts, housing, political participation, affirmative action and employment, justice, lesbian and gay rights, and the digital divide. Among the other contributors are PRRAC Board Chair John Boger (“The New Legal Attack on Educational Diversity in America’s Elementary & Secondary Schools”) and PRRAC Board member john a. powell (“Urban Fragmentation as a Barrier to Equal Opportunity”).

Add It Up: Using Research to Improve Education for Low-Income and Minority Students

(2001) A spin-off of our prior conference, “Effective Education for Low-Income and Minority Students.” This handbook is aimed at education reformers within and outside of the system. Written by Anne Lewis in collaboration with Sandra Paik; Foreword by Judith Johnson.

 

 

 

Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America

(2001) A second volume of the best articles and symposia from Poverty & Race, our bimonthly publication, on the country’s two most important, and seemingly intractable, social problems – and the added impact when they intersect.

 

 

 

 

Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America

(1997) The best articles and symposia from Poverty & Race, our bimonthly publication, on the country’s two most important, and seemingly intractable, social problems, and the added impact when they intersect.