His work has won numerous scholarly awards including a Spencer Fellowship from the National Academy of Education, the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL) 1998 Presidents' Award, the National Council for the Social Studies 2001 Distinguished Career Research in Social Studies Award, and the inaugural American Educational Research Association (AERA) Social Justice in Education Award for a career of research that advances social justice through education research in 2004.

[3] He, with Cherry A. McGee Banks, received the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association for Multicultural Education.

Banks was a Spencer Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University during the 2005–2006 academic year.

[4] Banks is a past president of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

His works include: Books by Banks have been translated into Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, and Arabic.

http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv978972 “Thanks, Professor Banks: ‘The Father of Multicultural Education’ is retiring after 50 at UW.

https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/james-banks-uw-retires-multicultural-education/ “Family of Fellows: Patricia Banks and James Banks.” Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, March 11, 2019. https://casbs.stanford.edu/news/family-fellows-patricia-banks-and-james-banks Tomlinson, S. (2021) ‘Book review: Diversity, Transformative Knowledge, and Civic Education: Selected essays, by James A. Banks’.

Review of Citizenship Education and Global Migration: Implications for Theory, Research, and Teaching, edited by James A.