Stacie McClam | Guest: The Exit Interview: A Podcast for Black Educators

Filmmaker/Educator/Author

Stacie McClam is a filmmaker, educator, and author. Her film production company, School Dismissed, focuses on films about K-12 education issues and solutions. Through film, Stacie exposes the realities that many students and staff face inside schools and reimagines education's future. She draws on years of teaching experience across the United States and abroad to tell stories rooted in real schools.

As a law school graduate, her legal education shapes her perspective in storytelling. Her upcoming trilogy of narrative fiction feature-length films about the benefits and challenges of AI in elementary, middle, and high schools is called THE SYSTEM Trilogy. The first film in the trilogy is MR. ADVOCATE releasing in summer 2026.

Aug. 3, 2026

In Front of the Classroom to Behind the Camera with Stacie McClam

Stacie McClam went from being bused to "better" schools as a Black child in LA, to teaching across DC, Japan, Denver, and Kuwait, and what she found everywhere was the same broken system dressed up differently. She became the "fix-up lady," repeatedly hired mid-year to salvage classrooms other teachers fled. She watched Black and Latino kids get pushed through grades without learning to read, saw phonics stripped from US curricula that worked brilliantly in Kuwait, and fought systems that celebrated bare minimum as excellence. The toll was real: shingles, hair loss, depression, and a PTSD diagnosis when it was all over. So she quit. Both teaching and law were another system she found too biased to use. Instead, Stacie picked up a camera. Her film production company, School Dismissed, is making a trilogy of narrative fiction films tackling AI surveillance, education inequity, and what Black students deserve. Her first film, Mr. Advocate, premieres this month. Her message is cl…

Guest: Stacie McClam

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