First Tuesdays -- Pounding the Pavement, Hitting the Books: The Black-White Divide after High School

Audio Recording

Linda Harris is the director of youth policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). She has more than 25 years of experience in youth and workforce development policy, research, and administration at the local, state, and national levels. Her expertise is disconnected and disadvantaged youth in high-poverty communities. Harris cochairs the Campaign for Youth, which seeks to raise awareness about youth who drop out of school and fall outside the labor market mainstream. Before CLASP, she was the director of Baltimore’s Office of Employment Development and administrator for the Baltimore City Private Industry Council. 

Harry J. Holzer is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an Institute fellow at the Urban Institute. He is a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor and a former professor of economics at Michigan State University. Holzer’s research focuses on the labor market problems of low-wage workers and other disadvantaged groups. He is the author of Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men (with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner) and editor of Reshaping the American Workforce for a Changing Economy (with Demetra Nightingale).

Marla McDaniel is a research associate in the Urban Institute’s Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population. Her research focuses on family resources, social policies, and race, and their influence on child and adult health and well-being. She has studied and written reports on the transition to adulthood for youth nationally and in foster care, examining differences by income, race, and ethnicity. Before earning her doctorate in human development and social policy from Northwestern University, she worked as a case manager for foster youth in Chicago.

Margaret Simms (moderator) is an Institute fellow at the Urban Institute and the director of its Low-Income Working Families project. Prior to joining the Institute in 2007, she was the vice president for governance and economic analysis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, where she began working in 1986. Simms was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute from 1979 to 1986 and directed its Minorities and Social Policy Program from 1981 to 1986. She has taught at Atlanta University and the University of California at Santa Cruz and has written extensively about employment and training, education, and income and poverty.

William Spriggs became the assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Labor in October. For the previous four years, he chaired Howard University’s economics department. He has served as the executive director of the National Urban League’s Institute for Opportunity and Equality and a senior economist for the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee. Spriggs has also worked at the National Commission for Employment Policy, Department of Commerce, and Small Business Administration. He is a past president of the National Economic Association, the professional organization of black economists.