Jorge Ruiz de Velasco is the Deputy Director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. Affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, the Gardner Center develops leadership, conducts research, and works to support reform efforts in youth-serving organizations. His work focuses on the study and promotion of change in public schools, the implications of education reform for disadvantaged students, education law and policy, and the effect of immigration on schools and communities. Dr. Ruiz de Velasco comes to Stanford from Berkeley Law, where he was Director of the Warren Institute’s Program on Education Law and Policy. Prior to his appointment at the Warren Institute, he served as Director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford and has served terms as a Program Officer for Educational Opportunity and Scholarship at the Ford Foundation, and as a Senior Program Officer at both the James Irvine and William & Flora Hewlett Foundations. Dr. Velasco also served as a Senior Research Associate at The Urban Institute and as a lawyer and policy analyst for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. He is a graduate of Harvard College (1984), and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (1987). Subsequently, he earned an M.A. in Education Administration and Policy Analysis (1994) and a Ph.D. in Political Science (1999), both from Stanford University.
