2006 Grow Your Own Summit Keynote Speakers

Dr. Charles Payne , Duke University, is the Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of History, African American Studies and Sociology and the Director of the African and African American Studies. He is the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education; Debating the Civil Rights Movement and the award-winning I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Movement and the co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950. His scholarly focus remains urban education, the Civil Rights Movement, social change, and social inequality. With the help of a Senior Scholar Award from the Spencer Foundation, he is currently working on a book on what has been learned from the last decade of school reform.

Eloise Lopez Metcalfe has been the Director of the Teacher Education at Center X, UCLA’s experiment in preparing teachers to work on hard-to-staff Los Angeles schools, along with its alumni support group, the Urban Education Network, since 1998. She grew up in Watts, and taught in elementary schools for 20 years. " At UCLA's credentialing program, we focus on preparing teachers for the urban settings where they're most in demand by providing extra peer and mentor support, immersion in community-specific cultures, and results-proven techniques grounded in rigorous research. As a result, 71 percent of our program graduates stay on the job longer than six years, and 88 percent remain in education -- far greater than the national averages." The preparation of teachers for urban schools and the diversity of the teaching workforce are two of Dr. Metcalfe’s research interests. Click here to download Dr. Metcalfe's Powerpoint Presentation.