Charles Payne

Research Areas:
Charles M. Payne’s areas of research interest include urban education, social inequality, social change and modern African American history.

Activities & Honors:
Charles M. Payne is the author of I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995) which has won awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice Magazine, the Simon Wisenthal Center and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Currently, he is finishing So Much Reform, So Little Change forthcoming (Harvard Education Publishing Group), a book which is concerned with what we have learned in the last decade or so about what it takes to create large scale improvement in urban districts. He is also in the process of co-editing two anthologies, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation (forthcoming, Teachers College Press) and Holding Back the Ocean with a Broom: Implementing Change in Urban Schools. He has been a member of the Board of the Chicago Algebra Project, of Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the Research Advisory Committee for the Chicago Annenberg Project, the editorial boards of a Chicago journal on school reform and the Sociology of Education. He currently serves on the Board and the Education Committee of MDRC and the editorial board of Educational Researcher. He is the co-founder of the Duke Curriculum Project, which involves university faculty in the professional development of public school teachers and also co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Scholars, which tries to better prepare high school youngsters for college. Payne was founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, a nonprofit community center that attempts to broaden educational experiences for urban youngsters. Payne is a Carnegie Scholar for 2004 and is the winner of a Senior Scholar grant from the Spencer Foundation for the 2006-7 school year. He has taught at Southern University, Williams College, Northwestern University and Duke University. At Northwestern, he held the Charles Deering Mccormick Chair for Teaching Excellence and at Duke, the Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for excellence in teaching and research.

Selected Publications:
• Payne, C.M. (Expected completion, September, 2006). So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Harvard Education Publishing Group.
• Payne, C.M., and Carol Strickland, eds. (Expected completion, March, 2006). Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation.
• Payne, C.M., and Adam Green, eds. (2003). Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism. NYU Press.
• Payne, C.M. and Lawson, S. (1999). Debating the Civil Rights Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Payne, C.M. (1995). I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. University of California Press.