García, Eugene E. (1946-)

Eugene E. Garcia was director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA)—currently known as the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA)—of the U.S. Department of Education from 1993 to 1995. Garcia was born on June 3, 1946, in a small town on the western slope of Colorado named Grand Junction. His parents were migrant farm workers from the “Four Corners” area—the border region of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah—who worked in seasonal crops, harvesting sugar beets, cherries, apricots, peaches, apples, and pears.

Although neither of his parents attended school on a regular basis, Eugene's family deeply valued education. From young childhood, he was taught in his native Spanish language to value education as an important resource. To all of his children, Eugene's father would often say, “Nunca te pueden quitar la educación” (“They can never take your education away”). Although his parents could not offer their children traditional schooling—literacy, mathematics, and science skills—the education Eugene and his siblings received from their parents were respect for family, respect for elders, respect for others, hard work, persistence, patience, the importance of spirituality, and so on.

After completing a BS in psychology at the University of Utah in 1968, Garcia attended graduate school at the University of Kansas, where he received an MS in child development in 1970 and a PhD in human development in 1972. He also completed postdoctoral work at Harvard University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Research Council and the Kellogg Foundation.

Garcia's professional career has been marked by an ongoing commitment to academia, research, administration, and other scholarly activities. He has served as professor, researcher, mentor, and administrator, often concurrently. From 1980 to 1987, he served as director of the Center for Bilingual Education and Research at Arizona State University; from 1990 to 1993, he was chair of the Department of Education and dean of the Division of Social Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz; during this period, he was also director of the National Research Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. From 1993 to 1995, he was director of OBEMLA during President Bill Clinton's administration; from 1995 to 2001, he served as dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, during which time he was a special advisor to the university chancellor. Subsequently, he served as dean of the Mary Lou Fuller College of Education at Arizona State University from 2002 until 2006. In 2003, Garcia was appointed vice president of School-University Partnerships at Arizona State University and is the current chair of the National Task Force on Early Childhood Education for Hispanics.

Even though he has had extensive administrative experience, his fundamental function and identity continues to be that of a professor and researcher. In collaboration with colleagues and grant-issuing bodies nationwide, Garcia has earned more than $13 million in research funding during the past 30 years, serving as principal investigator or coinvestigator, to [Page 316]increase the scientific and practical knowledge-base concerning issues of language development, early education, cognition, bilingualism, culture, curriculum and instruction, and effective schooling practices for language minority and Hispanic children. He has been a professor in the psychology and education departments at several universities, including the University of Utah, the University of California-Santa Barbara, Arizona State University, the University of California-Santa Cruz, and the University of California-Berkeley. Since 2002, he has been a professor in curriculum and instruction at Arizona State University.

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