Maira Martinez
Program Associate
Maira entered the education field in 2016, through a teaching apprenticeship with AmeriCorps. She became passionate about language and learning more about how the education system functions to support different identities. Her Senior Thesis at UC Berkeley explored the implications of Dual Immersion Bilingual Programs on Latinx communities in the Central Valley. She’s also supported research projects with various entities such as: The Family and Culture Lab at UC Berkeley, Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis, Policy Analysis for California Education, and Stanford Law School. These projects have ranged in topics such as: the social-emotional development of children, bilingualism, the immigrant experience, and continuous improvement practices in schools.
At her most recent role, she was a school administrator in a TK-8 Charter School, leading family engagement efforts. She supported family engagement and the social-emotional development of students during virtual learning at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Afterwards, she supported on-campus engagement as families and students returned to a physical school.
She holds a BA from UC Berkeley and a MA from Stanford Graduate School of Education. She is interested in advocating for underrepresented communities and in how education structures and policy can be used as tools to address barriers for communities of color. Her lived experiences as a child of immigrant farm workers and being the first in her family to attend college, inform her approaches to addressing these paradigm shift questions of transforming schools into more equitable spaces.
