Ana F. Ponce, EdD ’13, executive director of Great Public Schools Now, has been named the 2019 Educator of the Year by the Loyola Marymount University School of Education.
She received the award and delivered a keynote speech at the annual Kappa Delta Pi and SOE Awards Ceremony on Sunday, April 28, 2019, in the Hilton Center for Business at Loyola Marymount University. Watch her keynote address below.
Click here to view photos from the event.
Ponce is the first graduate of the LMU SOE Doctorate in Educational Leadership for Social Justice to receive this award.
“It is an honor to recognize Ana for her extraordinary leadership and unwavering commitment to ensuring that children and families across Los Angeles have access to a quality education,” said Mary K. McCullough, interim dean and professor of the LMU School of Education. “We are proud of her and the work she is doing to pursue educational equity and quality in our city.”
Ponce joined Great Public Schools Now (GPSN), a Los Angeles nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring all Los Angeles students receive a high-quality education, as executive director in February 2019. Prior to GPSN, Ponce served as the chief executive officer of Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, a network of six charter schools and an early education center serving more than 3,600 students in central Los Angeles, for more than 18 years. Her accomplishments prompted Forbes magazine in 2011 to name her one of the top seven most powerful educators in the world.
Ponce is the youngest daughter of Mexican immigrants and the first in her family to graduate college. She earned a full scholarship to Middlebury College in Vermont, a world away from Pico Union, the neighborhood where she grew up. Her first teaching job was a Teach For America assignment at a public school in South L.A. After three years in the classroom, she landed a fellowship at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York, where she earned a master’s degree in bilingual education.
Determined to close the achievement and opportunity gaps for low-income minority students, she returned to Los Angeles and helped open the first independent charter school in South L.A., where she taught for seven years before joining Camino Nuevo in 2001. At Camino Nuevo, she found herself working with families in the neighborhood where she grew up, investing them and their children in being “College Ready, College Bound.”
During her tenure as CEO, Ana was instrumental in driving the success of the organization and championing high quality educational opportunities for students. She has demonstrated that schools comprised almost entirely of English learners, in some of the city’s poorest and densest neighborhoods, can achieve extraordinary results and serve as models of excellence.
Ponce holds a second master’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and a doctorate in educational leadership from Loyola Marymount University. A veteran of the charter school movement in California, she serves on several boards and committees, including the Board of the California Charter Schools Association, the Educators of Color (EdLoc) Leadership Committee, the L.A. County Commission on Local Government Services, UnidosUS and the LMU School of Education Alumni Association Board.
Past recipients of the SOE’s Educator of the Year Award include Francisco Rodriguez, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District; Antonia Hernandez, president and CEO of the California Community Foundation; Michael Kirst, then-president of the California State Board of Education; Kevin Baxter, MA ’01, senior director and superintendent of Catholic Schools of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles; Patricia Gándara, research professor of education and co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA; and Gregory Boyle, S.J., MA ’85, of Homeboy Industries.
