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. He is currently the Chief Education Officer for Chicago Public Schools and was previously the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor
at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration.

Education and career

Charles Payne received a Bachelor's Degree in Afro-American studies from Syracuse University

Syracuse University

Syracuse University is a private research university located in Syracuse, New York, United States. Its roots can be traced back to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1832, which also later founded Genesee College...

 in 1970 and a Ph.D in sociology from Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

 in 1976. He has held professorial positions and endowed chairs at numerous American institutions, among them Southern University

Southern University

Southern University and A&M College is a historically black college located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Baton Rouge campus is located on Scott’s Bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in the northern section...

, Williams College

Williams College

Williams College is a private liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams. Originally a men's college, Williams became co-educational in 1970. Fraternities were also phased out during this...

, Haverford College

Haverford College

Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...

, Northwestern, Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, where he held the Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for Teaching Excellence, and the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, where he is currently the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration.

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

John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin was a United States historian and past president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and...

Scholars, a program that helps Durham-area high schoolers prepare for and apply to college. His other projects have included the Duke Curriculum Project, the Education for Liberators Network, and work with the Chicago Algebra Project and with the Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

His most recent books are So Much Reform, So Little Change (Harvard Education Publication Group , 2008 ) and an anthology about the African-American tradition of education for liberation entitled Teach Freedom (Teacher's College Press, 2008).

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)

So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (2008)

Various articles on urban education and civil rights http://www.ssa.uchicago.edu/faculty/facpublic.shtml#payne.