Charles Payne

Charles Payne’s research and teaching interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, and social change and modern African American history, particularly the Black Freedom Struggle. With his colleagues Charity Anderson and Decoteau Irby, he has just finished an anthology entitled Dignity-Affirming Education: Cultivating the “Somebodiness” of Students and Educators (Teachers College Press). One of his current book projects, entitled Schooling the Ghetto: Fifty Years of “Reforming” Urban Schools, is an attempt to synthesize what we should have learned about improving the schooling and life outcomes of children from disenfranchised communities. It is also a commentary on the difficulties social scientists have serving the equity interests of the poor. He is also finishing a collection of essays, Nobody’s Fault But Mine: Black Youth After Trump, in which he argues that the current political climate requires rethinking the ways we frame discourses about Black youngsters. Other works include So Much Reform, So Little Change (Harvard Education Publishing Group, 2008), which examines the persistence of failure in urban schools, and the coedited anthology, Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African-American Tradition (Teachers College Press, 2008).

Payne has been a member of the Board of the Chicago Algebra Project, of the Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the Research Advisory Committee for the Chicago Annenberg Project, the editorial boards of Catalyst, the Sociology of Education and Educational Researcher, and the advisory board for the Teacher College Press series on social justice. He is also a cofounder of the Duke Curriculum Project, which involved university faculty in the professional development of public school teachers, and also of the John Hope Franklin Scholars, which tries to better prepare high school youngsters for college. He has regularly been named to Edu-Scholar’s list of scholars who contribute most to public debates about education.

His ISGRJ project includes the convening of scholars, researchers, teachers, students, administrators, activists, and community partners for a statewide education conference, first held in summer 2022. He is also the Director of the Affiliate Center, The Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. 

Publications:

• Decoteau Irby, Charity Anderson and Charles Payne, (eds.) Dignity-Affirming Education: Cultivating the “Somebodiness,” of Students and Teachers., New York: Teachers College Press, 2022.

• “Claim No Easy Victories: Some Notes toward a Fearless Sociology of Education,” In Jal Mehta and Scott Davies, eds. Education in a New Society: Renewing the Sociology of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

• Charles Payne and Cristina Ortiz*, "Doing the Impossible: The Limits of Schooling. The Power of Poverty,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 673(1) (September 2017): 32-59

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Superintendents Leadership Forum, UC Berkeley

• NEH Summer seminar for teachers, Children Defense Fund

• NEH Summer Seminar, Teachers, College Columbia

Previous Organizations: 

• Children's Defense Fund

• Brotherhood Sister Sol

• Statewide Coalition for Educational Equity

Accomplishments:

• Lecture discussion series on Freedom Schools

• Helping Newark Public Schools improve graduation rates

• 2022 INDIES Book of the Year Honorable Mention in Education for "Dignity-Affirming Education"

Upcoming Projects:

• Working with the NJ Department of Education to replicate high-performing schools.

• Working with NPS to improve high school graduation rates

I am generally concerned both as a scholar and organizer with bottom-up change, especially as it affects Black Americans.

The Inclusion Project's programming in 2021-2022 culminated in the virtual statewide conference "Re-Envisioning the Future of Educational Equity in New Jersey."

This conference for educators, community stakeholders, and researchers was held on June 11, 2022 and was the first in a series of meetings intended to produce an educational equity agenda for the state.  The issues addressed included disparities in resources and outcomes, funding, discipline, resource allocation, pre-school, disconnected youth, post-secondary outcomes, special education and segregation.  The conference reviewed relevant data on equity performance at the state and district level and initiated discussions about paths to better performance.

Watch the conference in its entirety here.