Urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history
Activities and Honors:
Payne received a Senior Scholar grant from the Spencer Foundation and was a Resident Fellow at the foundation for the 2006-2007 academic year. He was the recipient of a 2007 Fletcher Fellowship. He has been honored for his teaching at Northwestern University and at Duke University, where he held the Charles Deering McCormick Chair for Teaching Excellence and the Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for excellence in teaching and research.
Charles M. Payne is one of the nation’s most prominent scholars in the study of urban school reform and social inequality. A sociologist by training, his work spans many disciplines. He has written an award-winning history of the civil rights movement and authored some of the most provocative and comprehensive research studies on urban schools.
In reflecting on his work, Payne says, “I don’t think of myself so much in disciplinary terms as I think of myself as just a student of social change, especially bottom-up change, especially as it affects African Americans. …I have spent most of my career pursuing those questions in the context of the civil rights movement and urban school improvement.”
Payne recently completed two books. So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (April 2008) examines the ways in which reform is undermined by weak social and political infrastructure coupled with the inability of adults to cooperate. The anthology, Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African American Tradition (March 2008) focuses on the African American tradition of education for liberation.
Among Payne’s other works are Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education (1984), which looks at the variety of ways problem students can respond to different teachers; and I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (2nd ed., 2007), which is a story of the civil rights movement from the activists’ point of view. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement (2nd ed., 2006) and Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950 (2003).
Payne has received a number of awards for I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, including the Outstanding Academic Book from the magazine Choice, the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States, the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council and the McLemore Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society. He also received an Outstanding Academic Book award from Choice for Getting What We Ask For.
Before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago, Payne was Professor of African and African American Studies, Sociology and History and a Bass Fellow at Duke University. He previously served as Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University.
Payne is co-founder of the Duke Curriculum Project, which involves university faculty in the professional development of public school teachers. He is co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Scholars, a Saturday college preparatory academy. He is one of the founders of the Education for Liberation Network, which encourages the development of educational initiatives that help young people think critically about social issues and develop their own capacity to address these issues. With the support of the Carnegie Corporation, he is conducting a study of school reform and social inequality in other countries.
Payne has served on the Board of the Chicago Algebra Project, on the Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, and on the Research Advisory Committee for the Chicago Annenberg Project. He is a member of the editorial boards of Catalyst, the Sociology of Education, Educational Researcher and High School Journal. He is on the advisory board for Teacher College Press' social justice series.
Selected Publications:
• Payne, C. M. (2008). So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
• Payne, C. M. and Strickland, C. (2008). Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African American Tradition. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Payne, C. M. and Lawson, S. (2006). Debating the Civil Rights Movement (2nd. Ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Payne, C. M. and Green, A. (2003). Time Longer than a Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950. New York: New York University Press.
• Payne, C. M. (1995). I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Payne, C. M. (1984). Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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