Gutiérrez grew up in Miami, Arizona. Her father worked in a nearby copper mine.[5] Gutiérrez earned her master's degree from Arizona State University and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder.[6][7]
She started working in the education department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1989.[8] She earned the 1997 Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA.[8] At UCLA she helped create a computer learning club for elementary students and worked on the Migrant Student Leadership Institute for students from the migrant farm-working community.[5] Students from the Migrant Student Leadership Institute were more likely to apply to college and be accepted than a control group.[5] Gutiérrez also studied the effects of Proposition 227 in California in three different school districts after the law was passed in 1998.[9]
When President Barack Obama was transitioning to the White House, she was part of the transition team.[5] In 2012, Obama appointed her to the board of directors of the National Board for Education Sciences.[10]
Gutiérrez earned the C Sylvia Scribner Award in 2005 from the American Educational Research Association (AERA).[1] She earned the 2007 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Committee on Scholars of Color in Education.[7] In 2009, Hispanic Business Magazine listed her as one of the top 100 influential Hispanic people in the United States.[3] Also in 2009, she became the president-elect of AERA.[11]
In 2014 Gutiérrez was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from AERA.[12] The Same year, she was honored with the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education.[12]
She has been published in Educational Researcher,[13] Mind, Culture, and Activity,[14] Harvard Educational Review,[15] Reading Research Quarterly,[16] Theory Into Practice,[17] Linguistics and Education,[18] Language Arts,[19] Review of Research in Education,[20] Research in the Teaching of English,[21] the Journal of Teacher Education,[22] and other publications.
