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

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He is author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education (1984) and I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995); the latter book won awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. He is coauthor of Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1999), coeditor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950 (2003), and coeditor of Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African American Tradition (2008).

Payne has served on the board of the Chicago Algebra Project, the Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the Research Advisory Committee for the Chicago Annenberg Project, and the editorial boards of Catalyst, Sociology of Education, and Educational Researcher. He is cofounder of the Duke Curriculum Project, which involves university faculty in the professional development of public school teachers, and cofounder of the John Hope Franklin Scholars, which prepares high school youngsters for college. He is among the founders of the Education for Liberation Network, which encourages the development of educational initiatives to help young people to think critically about social issues and to understand their own capacity for addressing them. He was also the founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, a nonprofit community center that broadens educational experiences for urban youngsters.

Payne has taught at Southern University, Williams College, Northwestern University, and Duke University. He has won several teaching awards; he held Northwestern’s Charles Deering McCormick Chair for Teaching Excellence and Duke’s Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for excellence in teaching and research.