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 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 clear: the system isn't failing by accident. And she's done explaining that in words nobody reads now; she's showing it on screen.
