Sarita E. Brown

Sarita E. Brown was appointed to the Board of Visitors on December 10, 2008. She currently serves as a member of the Academic & Research Advancement and Student Advancement Committees.

Ms. Brown, President, Excelencia in Education, has spent more than two decades at prominent national academic and educational institutions and at the highest levels of government working to develop more effective strategies to raise academic achievement and opportunity for lowincome and minority students. From the start of her career at the University of Texas at Austin, where she created a national model promoting minority success in graduate education, to her service as Executive Director for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, to her current post as founding President of Excelencia in Education in Washington, DC, Ms. Brown has focused her work on expanding this country’s human capital through improving the quality of higher education.

While serving as Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans under President Clinton and Secretary of Education Riley (1997-2000), Ms. Brown released the report, “Creating the Will: Hispanics Achieving Educational Excellence,” with recommendations to stakeholders from all sectors to close the educational achievement gap of Latino students from early childhood to graduate and professional education. From 2001-03, she worked to increase federal support for Latinos in higher education, and helped the Hispanic Scholarship Fund establish a public sector affiliate by serving as founding President of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Institute. In 2003-2004, she continued to focus on federal policy and Latino higher educational success as senior fellow at the Pew Hispanic Center while incubating the new nonprofit organizations, Excelencia in Education, which was launched in Washington, DC in June 2004.

Ms. Brown is an advisor to several national initiatives and publications including the National Association for Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund initiative for newly elected school board members, the Arthur M. Blank foundation Pathways to Success Initiative, TERC’s President’s Advisory Council, and the national advisory board for the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education. She has received numerous awards, including the 2004 Outstanding Graduate alumnus, The University of Texas at Austin, 2003-04 Outstanding Alumnus for the College of Communications, University of Texas at Austin; the 2003 Outstanding Contributions to Higher Education award from the National Association for School Personnel Administration (NASPA); and the 2002 Women of Distinction award from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She holds a bachelor’s of arts in ethnic studies and a bachelor’s of science and master’s of arts in communication from The University of Texas at Austin.