Jorge Ruiz de Velasco

​Jorge Ruiz de Velasco joined the board of directors of The Wallace Foundation in June 2017.

​He serves as deputy director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University, which he joined as associate director in 2013. The focus of his work is the study and promotion of change in public schools, the implications of education reform for disadvantaged students, education law and policy, and the effect of immigration on schools and communities.

​Ruiz de Velasco came to Stanford from Berkeley Law, where he was director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute's Program on Education Law and Policy. Before his appointment to the Warren Institute, Ruiz de Velasco served terms as a program officer for educational opportunity and scholarship at the Ford Foundation, and as a senior program officer at both The James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

​He has also served as a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and as a lawyer and policy analyst for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

​​Ruiz de Velasco is a graduate of Harvard University (1984) and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (1987). Subsequently, he earned an M.A. in education administration and policy analysis (1994) and a Ph.D. in political science (1999), both from Stanford University.