Pérez-Hogan, Carmen (1939-)

Carmen Ana Pérez-Hogan was born on luly 28, 1939, in Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Her lifelong work has been to make the best educational opportunities available to children and youth who, like herself, spoke another language upon entering school. Only 7 years old when she came to New York City, she attended public schools on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn before there were English as a Second Language (ESL) programs or bilingual classes. She went through the discomfort of repeating second grade while she learned English in a “sink or swim” school. After graduating from Bay Ridge High School, Pérez-Hogan earned a B A in Early Childhood Education from St. loseph's College in Brooklyn. She then earned a master's degree in ESL from Hunter College of the City University of New York.

After several years of teaching sixth graders and ESL in District 13 (Brooklyn), Pérez-Hogan became district coordinator of the ESL program. When the Bilingual Education Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1968, Pérez-Hogan wrote the first Title VII proposal for a bilingual program for District 13, which was funded to establish two bilingual schools in that district. Subsequently, she received a fellowship to do doctoral work in educational administration at New York University, where she studied for a year.

After working in District 13 for several years, Pérez-Hogan was invited to work in higher education in the Bilingual Education Project at the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany. She moved to Albany and taught courses, advised students, and wrote proposals for funding for the master's and doctoral programs in bilingual education at that university. Pérez-Hogan also organized the first statewide conference of the New York State Association for Bilingual Education. She was elected president of the National Association for Bilingual Education in 1979.

Pérez-Hogan became chief of the Bureau of Bilingual Education of the New York State Education Department in 1978 and continued to manage the state's bilingual education programs for 27 years as the leader of the State's Office of Bilingual Education, playing a major role in shaping policy and practice until she retired in 2005. Among her accomplishments as the coordinator of the Office of Bilingual Education for the New York State Education Department are establishing state certification requirements for teachers of bilingual education and ESL; founding a Bilingual ESL Teacher Leadership Academy to identify and further prepare bilingual and ESL teachers with outstanding potential; securing more than $100 million in state aid for English language learner (ELL) students over her career; developing and funding a two-way bilingual education program model; coordinating a technical assistance network of 13 Bilingual Education Technical Assistance Centers, including centers to address the specific needs of Asian, Haitian, and Spanish language communities; creating an ESL curriculum for secondary schools; drafting guidelines for the education of ELL children with handicapping conditions; producing bilingual glossaries for global history, American history, mathematics, and science in Chinese, Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Korean, Russian, and eight other languages; developing ESL and language arts standards and assessments for ELLs; and creating a successful parent leadership model for parents of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students.

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