Patricia C. Gándara

Patricia Gándara is a research professor in the School of Education & Information Studies and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. She was also chair of the Working Group on Education for the University of California-Mexico Initiative, in which she has spearheaded a number of California-Mexico education projects. Gándara's primary areas of work are civil rights, democracy & voting rights, education, immigrant rights, and language access and biliteracy.

Among her 10 books are The Latino Education Crisis with Frances Contreras, Forbidden Language: English Learners and Restrictive Language Policies with Megan Hopkins, and The Bilingual Advantage: Language, Literacy, and the U.S. Labor Market with Rebecca Callahan, a compilation of studies that demonstrates the economic value of biliteracy in a rapidly globalizing world. Her most recent books include The students we share: Preparing US and Mexican educators for our transnational future (in Spanish and English) with Bryant Jensen and Schools under siege: The impact of immigration enforcement on educational equity with Jongyeon Ee.  

She received her PhD in educational psychology from UCLA. She has been a bilingual school psychologist, a social scientist with the RAND Corporation and Director of Education Research in the California legislature. She has also been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, the French-American Association at Sciences Po Graduate Institute, Paris, an ETS fellow and trustee at Princeton, New Jersey, and a fellow of the National Academy of Education. She is the recipient of the 2019 Alfonso Garcia Robles prize on behalf of work with migrants by the Autonomous University of Mexico.