Dr. Charles M. Payne, Rutgers University-Newark
Charles M. Payne is the Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, where he also directs the Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research. He is a historian and sociologist whose interests include urban education and school reform, continuous improvement research, social inequality, social change, and modern African American history. Dr. Payne’s books include Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education; So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Education; and I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. He is co-editor of the forthcoming work, Dignity-Affirming Education: Cultivating ‘Somebodiness’ in Students and Educators (Teachers College Press, April 2022).
Dr. Payne has won several teaching awards at Northwestern University and Duke University and served briefly as chief academic officer for Chicago Public Schools.