Name: Sara Martinez Tucker
Firm:  United States Government
Title: U.S. Under Secretary of Education

When the Forté Foundation caught up with Sara Martinez Tucker last year, she was the president and CEO of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.  Just two weeks after the interview, President George Bush Jr. nominated Martinez Tucker for the job of U.S. Under Secretary of Education. While she never spilled the beans during our interview, Martinez Tucker did playfully foreshadow the event: Asked about her stint on the 2006 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Martinez Tucker quipped: “I have to say this, and you’re going to chuckle about it later: It was truly life-changing for me.”

Every Saturday evening after mass in Laredo, Texas, little Sara Martinez Tucker engaged in the same disagreement with her father. Perched on a restaurant chair, her church shoes barely brushing the floor, Martinez stubbornly would order her favorite, cheese enchiladas. “I loved them,” she says.

Martinez’ father viewed his daughter’s culinary rut as an obstacle to broader career horizons.  “My dad would say ‘I know you can get cheese enchiladas anywhere in Laredo, but they’re not always going to be on the menu. I want a better life for you, and I want you to pick new and different foods so that you won’t be embarrassed at restaurants when you’re older,’” Martinez recalls.

Today, Martinez Tucker, is pushing the same “think bigger” challenge to Latinos and Latinas across the country. Confirmed as the under secretary in December 2006, Martinez Tucker works hand-in-hand with the U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. She coordinates policies and creates programs related to vocational and adult education, postsecondary education and college aid.

Making higher education accessible is a mission near and dear to Martinez Tucker's heart. She spent nine years as the driving force behind the HSF -- turning Hispanic families on to the power of education, beefing up scholarship funds to $195 million, and challenging all of America to see the return on investment from educating Latino children.

"More Americans have to understand that this is not a nebulous idea. Every one of us is impacted by the dropout rate of the Hispanic community," Martinez Tucker says.

Martinez Tucker's passion for this area is personal. Although she credits her MBA from University of Texas at Austin for opening up her career world, Martinez Tucker admits she didn't appreciate the impact until much later.

 "I don't know if a lot of young women understand what's possible with an MBA. I certainly didn't," she says. "For me, it was a means to an end -- never, ever appreciating what a different launch pad it would be. My undergrad degree wasn't enough to get me out of South Texas, it took two degrees to launch me into my professional career."

Born in 1955, Martinez Tucker grew up a first-generation to college Hispanic in a city nestled on the dusty border of Texas. Her family, which owned a small convenience store, made education a priority and sacrificed to send her and her two siblings to Catholic elementary school.

Early on, Martinez Tucker shined. In third grade she completed her school work so quickly that the nuns put her in charge of the school lunch program. "I had to make sure I had someone at the door punching tickets. Then after lunch, I had to sort the tickets and distribute them back to the classrooms for the morning," she says.

Some of that confidence deflated in public high school, where the scrawny, shy Martinez Tucker sailed through her classes, but felt like a social outsider. She graduated valedictorian and decided to earn a journalism degree from UT-Austin. ("It was the 1970s and Woodward and Bernstein were hot; You saw the power of journalism," she says.)

Still, that introvertedness followed her. "I did not leave Laredo with any confidence," she says. She picked classes that based their grades strictly on tests and reports. "I never said a word my entire undergraduate experience," she says.

Tired of being poor, she wrapped up her degree in two and a half years and took a job as a reporter for the San Antonio Express newspaper, where she quickly became disillusioned with the cantankerous naysayers in the newsroom. Intent on starting a magazine, Martinez Tucker enrolled in B-school. "My dad really convinced me that an MBA would help me understand accounting, resources and finance," she says.

On campus, Martinez Tucker had no interest in the career center or the corporate recruiters, but a friend double-booked an interview and begged Martinez Tucker to take the spot so the friend could avoid cancellation penalties. Martinez walked into the into the interview with AT&T Inc. with the attitude "Why would I want to work for a phone company?" and walked out with an invitation to interview for the company’s  fast-track middle management program. "I was 24-years-old and I saw it as a way to pay off my $10,000 in school debt and acquire business skills for the magazine I was going to start," she says.

Instead, she stayed 16 years, rising to the top ranks as the first Hispanic woman in an executive role -- serving finally as regional vice president for AT&T's Global Business Communication Systems., where she led a $400 million division to its highest profit levels. There, she tapped into her business acumen, shored up her confidence and found her voice as she navigated through the company's centralization and decentralization.

Tired of the traveling, she took early retirement in 1996, invested her stock options, and settled in San Francisco with her husband for a "What's Next for Sara?" sabbatical. 

It didn't take long for the Hispanic Scholarship Fund to lure her to the president/CEO seat in 1997. At the helm, Martinez Tucker raised both awareness and funds for the non-profit organization -- earning her a spot as one of the 25 most influential Hispanics in America on Time Magazine's 2005 list. That same year Secretary Spellings appointed Martinez Tucker to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education where fellow members were wowed to find out that the woman who sounded 6' 2" on the phone only stood 5' 2".

 "She is bright, energetic, diplomatic, wise and most important to me, nice," writes distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University and fellow Commission on Higher Education member Richard Vedder in his September 2006 blog. "American education needs tough love, and Sara is the right kind of person to have at the Department of Education."

The McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin is a member of the Forté Foundation. To read more about McCombs’ commitment to women in business click here. The Forté Foundation is a consortium of worldwide corporations and business schools dedicated to inspiring women to take on business leadership roles. 

Donna J. Tuttle is a San Antonio freelance journalist.