Angelica Salazar (she/her/hers), Senior Policy Advocate, joined Public Advocates’ Education Equity Team in June 2023. She splits her time between her home base in Los Angeles and Public Advocates’ Sacramento office. Angie focuses on statewide advocacy to improve learning conditions and outcomes for multilingual learners and to grow a diverse, well-prepared educator workforce, especially for low-income Black, Indigenous, Latine, and most impacted students of color and multilingual learners.
Prior to joining Public Advocates, Angie was the Director of Education Equity at Children’s Defense Fund-California, where she led the organization’s education team toward advancing youth and parent power and equitable school funding. Angie’s research, advocacy, and coalition-building to transform systems started at the Children’s Defense Fund’s (CDF) national office in Washington DC, when she joined the movements to end mass incarceration and dismantle the school-to-prison-pipeline. As a former teacher, Angie understood how exclusionary and racist school discipline policies were systematically embedded in classrooms, and that it was critical to support the movement of students, parents, teachers, community organizers, policy makers, and allies to heal and transform schools. When Angie moved back to California, she worked in partnership with youth and parent leaders in Long Beach and across Los Angeles County on campaigns to invest more resources in restorative justice programming, and in greater educational support services for high need students of color.
Education and Background
Prior to serving at CDF for 11 years, Angie was a middle school teacher at the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she taught math, science, English, and history. Angie graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California in 2005 with a B.A. in International Relations and a minor in Urban Planning and Development. During Angie’s teacher preparation, she earned an M.A. in Elementary Education from Loyola Marymount University. Angie later earned an M.A. in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2010, where she focused on the intersections of the education and juvenile justice systems. Angie currently lives in Los Angeles with her wife, two toddlers, and four dogs.
