Charles M. Payne
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Charles M. Payne, Jr. is an American academic whose areas of study include civil rights activism, urban education reform, social inequality, and modern African-American history.
[edit] Education and Career
Charles Payne received a Bachelor's Degree in Afro-American studies from Syracuse University in 1970 and a Ph.D in sociology from Northwestern University in 1976[1]. He has held professorial positions and endowed chairs at numerous American institutions, among them Southern University, Williams College, Haverford College, Northwestern, Duke University, where he held the Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for Teaching Excellence, and the University of Chicago, where he is currently the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration[2].
Payne has also been active in the creation and direction of several organizations intended to address issues of social justice. He is the founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, N.J., a community-based effort to provide advanced career training for local youth. While at Duke, he co-founded the John Hope Franklin Scholars, a program that helps Durham-area high schoolers prepare for and apply to college[3]. His other projects have included the Duke Curriculum Project, the Education for Liberators Network, and work with the Chicago Algebra Project and the Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research.
Payne was an outspoken advocate of the controversial Education Buyout Initiative[4]. EBI would have paid underachieving students to leave school and to enter the workforce. This would have allowed teachers to focus their attention on higher-level students while allowing the others to make their future now.
He is currently in the process of publishing So Much Reform, So Little Change (Harvard Education Publication Group) and an anthology about the African-American tradition of education for liberation entitled Teach Freedom (Teacher's College Press)[5].
[edit] Publications
Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure In Urban Education (1984)
I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995)
co-author, Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1999)
co-editor, Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950 (2003)
Various articles on urban education and civil rights[6].
