In April 2020, Gutiérrez was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

[6][7] She started working in the education department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1989.

[5] Gutiérrez also studied the effects of Proposition 227 in California in three different school districts after the law was passed in 1998.

[10] Gutiérrez earned the C Sylvia Scribner Award in 2005 from the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

[12] The Same year, she was honored with the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education.