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Dr. Anthony Collatos is the Associate Dean of the Education Division and Professor of Education at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology. He has been a professor at Pepperdine University since 2005. Additionally, Dr. Collatos serves as the director of the Pat Lucas Center for Teacher Preparation, co-founded the Urban Parent/Teacher Education Collaborative (UPTEC), and has led multiple programs to increase college access and educational excellence for urban youth and their families. A former high school social studies teacher, Dr. Collatos has taught in higher education for 20 years and continues to teach master's and doctoral students, as well as serve as a dissertation chair and committee member for PhD and EdD candidates.
His research focuses on teacher education, sociology of education, family/school partnerships, urban education and policy, and critical research and pedagogy. A graduate of UCLA’s Urban Schooling program, he also served as a research associate with UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. His early research focused on the Futures Project, an eight-year longitudinal study that examined alternative pathways for first-generation urban youth to navigate the K–16 educational pipeline. His research was recognized with the University of California All Campus Consortium on Racial Diversity (UC/ACCORD) Dissertation Year Fellowship.
Beyond Pepperdine, Dr. Collatos has served actively in the community as an elected board member and president of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District (PVPUSD) Board. He also had a long-standing partnership with Parent U-Turn (PUT), a multicultural organization founded by the late Mary Johnson. Based in Southeast Los Angeles County, Parent U-Turn was a grassroots organization, established in 1999, that worked to empower parents as researchers and advocates to improve school conditions and challenge educational inequities. The collaboration has been highlighted in academic literature, including Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice. Dr. Collatos and Ms. Johnson also created and co-taught UPTEC, a programmatic teacher preparation program designed to implement and test a critical teacher education model that includes urban parents as teacher educators.
Dr. Collatos is now continuing this work by partnering with CA-FEN. Since last year, he has served as a strategic advisor to the Planning Team and to our research on family engagement in teacher preparation programs. He is currently leading the research on the pre-service survey. We are so thankful for his career-long commitment to strengthening family engagement in teacher prep programs!
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