Charles M. Payne is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Director of the Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research at Rutgers University in Newark. Among his other accomplishments, Professor Payne is the founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Scholars program, co-founder of the Duke Curriculum Project, and a founder of the Education for Liberation Network. His publications include 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), Debating the Civil Rights Movement (w/ Steven F. Lawson, 1999), and most recently, So Much Reform, So Little Change (2008). He will be speaking on how the current administration affects educational inequality in the United States.