Bringing Children Together: Magnet Schools and Public Housing Redevelopment

Philip Tegeler, Susan Eaton, and Westra Miller

“Bringing Children Together” offers recommendations for linking school and housing policy to create high quality, racially and economically diverse schools near revitalized public housing sites in urban areas.

A collaboration between the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, this report grows out of a roundtable meeting of the nation’s leading magnet school developers, and planners of public housing redevelopment projects. We focused on communities already targeted for so-termed Justice Reinvestment initiatives. This emerging movement makes investments in preventative programs so as to create structural changes in low-opportunity neighborhoods that have historically sent disproportionate numbers of residents to prison. Linking school and housing policies are relevant to the emerging Justice Reinvestment movement because of the close relationship between incarceration, neighborhood poverty and racial isolation.

The roundtable and this report were supported by the Open Society Institute.

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