Angela Valenzuela received her bachelor’s degree in English from Angelo State University, a master’s degree in Sociolinguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s and Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University.
Valenzuela is a professor in both the Educational Policy and Planning Program within the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Texas at Austin and holds a courtesy appointment in the Cultural Studies in Education Program within the Department of Curriculum & Instruction. She also serves as the director of the University of Texas Center for Education Policy (TCEP). Her previous teaching positions were in sociology at Rice University in Houston (1990-98), as well as a visiting scholar at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston (1998-99). Valenzuela also currently directs the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy (NLERAP) project. NLERAP’s specific goal is to establish a community-based, university- connected teacher educator pipeline for Latina and Latino high school youth in six sites throughout the country. With support from a fifteen-month, $300,000.00 grant from the Ford Foundation to the University of Texas at Austin Texas Center for Education Policy, she spearheads the planning phase of these institutes and developing a research agenda that will have local-, state-, and national-level policy implications for addressing the vexed Latino/a education student and teacher pipeline with a focus on the kinds of programmatic elements, policies, and curriculum development, that needs to be in place for the effective preparation of teachers.
Her research and teaching interests are in the sociology of education, race and ethnicity in schools, urban education reform, educational policy and immigrant youth in schools. She is the author of Subtractive Schooling: U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring and Leaving Children Behind: How “Texas-style” Accountability Fails Latino Youth. She has also served as co-editor of the Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
A Fulbright Scholar, Valenzuela spent her 2007-8 academic year in Mexico where she taught in the College of Law at the University of Guanajuato and conducted research in the areas of immigration, human rights, and binational relations.
Her research and teaching interests are in the sociology of education, race and ethnicity in schools, urban education reform, educational policy and immigrant youth in schools. She is the author of Subtractive Schooling: U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring and Leaving Children Behind: How “Texas-style” Accountability Fails Latino Youth. She has also served as co-editor of the Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
A Fulbright Scholar, Valenzuela spent her 2007-8 academic year in Mexico where she taught in the College of Law at the University of Guanajuato and conducted research in the areas of immigration, human rights, and binational relations.
Selected Publications:
Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth. Teachers College Press, 2016.
“Academia Cuauhtli and the Eagle:” Danza Mexica” and the Epistemology of the Circle.” With Emilio Zamora and Brenda Rubio. Voices in Urban Education 41 (2015): 46-56.
Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.
“The politics of collaboration.” With Douglas Foley. The landscape of qualitative research 1 (2008): 287.
Leaving Children Behind: How ‘Texas-style’ Accountability Fails Latino Youth. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.
“Let’s treat the cause, not the symptoms.” With Valencia, Richard R., et al. Educational equity and accountability: Paradigms, policies, and politics (2004): 29-38.
“High-stakes testing and US-Mexican youth in Texas: The case for multiple compensatory criteria in assessment.” Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy 14 (2002): 97-116.
“Reflections on the subtractive underpinnings of education research and policy.” Journal of Teacher Education 53.3 (2002): 235-242.
“The harmful impact of the TAAS system of testing in Texas: Beneath the accountability rhetoric.” With Linda McNeil. (2000).
“Familism and social capital in the academic achievement of Mexican origin and Anglo adolescents.” With Sanford M. Dornbusch. Social Science Quarterly (1994).