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President Bush named Margarita Pinkos as assistant deputy secretary and director of the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) on Dec. 23, 2007. In her position, she is the principal adviser to Secretary Margaret Spellings on all matters related to the education of limited English proficient (LEP) and language-minority students. As head of OELA, she administers Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act and Title VII of the Improving America's Schools Act, which both support high-quality instructional programs for linguistically and culturally diverse students. Additionally, her office supports quality foreign language programs for elementary, secondary and postsecondary school students and high-quality professional development programs for language teachers in these fields.

Prior to her appointment, since Sept. 1, 2007, she had served as OELA's acting assistant deputy secretary. Pinkos joined the Department as a senior policy advisor to the secretary and deputy director of the OELA on May 1, 2006.

Pinkos, née Zamora, emigrated to the United States as a 16-year-old refugee from the small sugar mill town of Baraguá, Cuba, where she was born and where her father was a mill worker and her mother a teacher and school principal. She arrived in Miami with her parents and brother, and her family lived with relatives in Puerto Rico for six months before settling in Palm Beach County, Fla.

After earning her associate in arts degree from Palm Beach Community College, Pinkos completed her undergraduate studies in zoology at Florida Atlantic University in 1975 and then lived abroad in Venezuela for nine years.

In 1984, she returned to Florida, where she began a long career with the Palm Beach County Public Schools when she was hired as an ESL teacher at Northboro Elementary School in West Palm Beach. At the same time she began her master's in education, which she finished in 1987 at Florida Atlantic University.

During the 1988–89 school year, due to the French she studied while living abroad, she was given the opportunity to serve as the district's Haitian Project Coordinator. That year, she also took advantage of the chance to study Haitian Creole, which, she said, gave her insight into the lives of her students and their parents.

In 1989, the district offered her an assistant principal's position at South Area High School, an alternative school, in Lake Worth. While posted there for four years, her duties also included supporting the district's five alternative education centers for troubled youths.

During the 1993–94 school year, Pinkos worked on the Area 5 Instructional team, coordinating and supporting ESL programs in 40 schools, while also helping them comply with Florida's Blueprint 2000 accountability initiative.

In 1994, the district offered her the job of turning around Gove Elementary School in rural Belle Glade, near Lake Okeechobee. The school, which had an enrollment of about 1,200 Pre-K–6 students, had received an "F" based on student scores from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). She initiated and implemented a dual language immersion program, and the school was designated as an international studies magnet program after two years. During her five years there, the school's FCAT scores increased to a "B" on the state exams, and two years after she left to head the district's multicultural education efforts, Gove Elementary received an "A" on the FCAT. While working at Gove, she also taught education classes part-time as an adjunct faculty member at Palm Beach Community College.

From 1999 to 2006, Pinkos served as the executive director for the district's Multicultural Education Department, managing a budget of $90 million, including federal Title I, Title III and Migrant funding; directly supervising 150 employees; and monitoring more than 1,500 school-based FTEs including paraprofessionals and administrators. She also continued to teach education classes as an adjunct faculty member for Florida Atlantic University, while finishing her doctorate there in educational leadership in 2002.

Grandmother of four and mother of two—a daughter, 30, in Florida, and a son, 25, in Michigan—Pinkos and her husband, Robert, an administrator with the Palm Beach County schools, divide their time between a residence in the Washington, D.C., area, and their home in West Palm Beach.