Kent McGuire and Zoe Stemm-Calderon on Building an Inclusive Public Education

Kent
And here, I thought, Katie, the whole point of this podcast was therapy for Zoe and me. I was confused. [Laughter]
 

Nancy (Host)
From The Giving Practice at Philanthropy Northwest, this is Can We Talk About…?, a project to normalize the messiness of leading for racial equity in philanthropy and reflect on what it takes to create lasting transformation. In season two, our hosts explore what it looks like for philanthropy to advance racial equity on the ground, where the work can vary greatly depending on the context—whether it’s place, issue area, or the community served. In a world where our contexts are constantly shifting, we’re asking guests to practice vulnerability, explore sticky topics, and look for learning. What we ask of you is to do the same.

Please note that this episode was recorded prior to the 2024 elections and includes perspectives and lessons learned from our guests as of October 2024.

Katie (Host)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Can We Talk About. My name is Katie Hong, and I'm a Senior Advisor with The Giving Practice at Philanthropy Northwest, and your host for this episode. For those of you tuning in for the first time, you're listening to the second season of our podcast, where we’re highlighting stories of what it looks like to operationalize equity on the ground in a variety of contexts, with today’s conversation focusing particularly on the education space. I’m so thrilled to be joined today by Kent McGuire, the Program Director of Education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Zoe Stem Calderon, the Senior Director of Youth-Serving Systems at the Riggs Foundation. They are here to offer their perspectives on what’s happening today in efforts to advance an inclusive public education in the United States. Collectively, the two of them bring decades of experience working in education and philanthropy. These two are some of the most creative and inspiring people I know in this space, so you’re in for a treat. Zoe, Kent, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. I’d love to start off this conversation by having you both briefly introduce yourselves to our listeners, and as part of that, if you could share one thing that you most want the audience to know about you, that would be great. Kent, why don’t I kick it off to you to start first?

Kent
Well, Katie, thank you. I’m thrilled to do this with you and with Zoe. I can’t actually think of a better person to do this with than you and Zoe. And of course, I can’t give you just one thing—I’ll give you two. The first thing, by way of introduction, is I’m Kent McGuire. I’ve worked at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for almost eight years. I’ve done a bunch of things before that, too many to list, and it would date me in the worst possible way. But the first thing I want people to know about me is that I’m a nice guy. I’m a reasonable fellow. You’d like me if you got to know me and worked with me. That’s the first thing I want people to know. The second thing I’d say is that I’ve considered myself to have been in the equity business for pretty much my entire career, which means I’ve had no shortage of things to work on. I’ve done it from the government, from the academy, in the policy community, and through philanthropy. So, I’ve tried to work on this sticky, thorny, and enduring problem from many different vantage points. I’ve learned a little something from each one of those, and I’m still trying to figure out how to win. That’s what I want people to know.

Katie (Host)
Awesome. And I can definitely vouch that you’re a very, very nice person.

Zoe
Yeah, I was going to say, I’ll co-sign that. Kent is great to work with. I’m Zoe Stem Calderon. I’ve been working at the Riggs Foundation for almost nine years. I’ve had a long—though not as long as Kent’s—career in education. I was a teacher, an instructional coach, a district administrator, and I’ve worked at the state level in education. Somehow, I’m now on this relatively new journey in philanthropy. The thing I want people to know is that, underneath all of that, the experience that animates the work I do started from growing up in a family that told me education and working hard were my pathways to making an impact in my own life, in my family’s life, and in the project that is America. I really believed them because I watched education change my parents' lives, and it changed mine, and got me into good schools, changing what we were able to do in our lives. I became a teacher right after graduating from college and went to a Latino community in Houston as a teacher. That’s when I saw that the opportunity infrastructure I thought was available to everyone—because this is America, and that’s what we do—was not the same in my students' community, even though their brilliance, their potential, and all the hopes their families had for them were exactly the same. They were telling their kids the exact same thing: "Work hard, get your education, and you’re going to be able to realize your dreams." I think my career has been animated by that experience, and by a kind of searching that I think I see in a lot of other people: How do we make that true? How do we make that opportunity infrastructure that I thought was available to everyone a reality? I think a lot of my search, like Kent’s, has been about finding where the leverage is and understanding the difference between changing elements of the system versus really redesigning it so that it does what we want it to. I feel really grateful to be working on that now at Raikes, and certainly my experience working with Kent is often about learning from his insights and experience. How can we do this together?

Katie (Host)
Yeah, that's great. Well, thank you again for that introduction. And really, what's going to be so great about this conversation is having both of you here speaking side by side about your different experiences together and your collective work. So actually, let's get into that. I'm curious if we could first set the context to help the audience understand where we are today, but within the long arc of the history of public education, inclusive public education here in the United States. I know in our planning calls, we talked about how there's a lot going on in the education space today, particularly what feels like attacks on inclusive public education. So activities like book bans or policies that dictate what kind of curriculum can be taught, including, sadly, what curriculum cannot be taught. So, Kent, can you start us off by reminding us how we should understand this current moment, and how and why it's important to understand today's challenges in the long history of public education here in the United States?

Kent
You know, Katie, I do think there are some things that are unique and different about this moment. And maybe the best way to see what's unique is to give you a bit of an arc. I mean, the thing that people take from this moment, you know, I see it all the time. I have to help my board grapple with this. Sometimes I have to help my colleagues grapple with this. The sense is that it’s as if we are seeing something we have never seen before, and in some ways, without help, we’re inclined to conclude: "Oh my goodness, we can't make progress on anything given the kind of prevailing conditions." Right? The strong headwinds and the dark clouds that seem to be hanging over us. If—my goodness—we took that view, you know, the chilling effect that that represents, that's exactly what I would argue folks want to have happen. And I think Zoe and I, each in our own ways, are actively trying to persuade each other that this is not the right way to think about the moment that we're in. So having a chance to say, "Okay, what is the right way to think about the moment we're in?" is a good thing to wrestle with and talk about.

But what I'd say is that education, specifically public education, has always been contested ground. It never hasn't been. Right? You know, the fights have been about different things, and oddly enough, to some degree, they've been about the same things over time. Right? There was the Jim Crow era, where the fights were about whether kids could or should go to school with each other. In fact, it was codified that separate could be equal, right? I find elements of that tenor in efforts these days to want to privatize things, right? "Well, we can do this, and people can separate and go their own ways, and we won't have any equity problems. What are you talking about?" There was Brown v. Board of Education, where we sort of made the case that who you go to school with actually matters, in part because there's a certain public commitment that comes along with that, and that public commitment helps us with issues like resource equity, which again is, you know, something that is alive and well today, as we talk about it. There was the War on Poverty in the Civil Rights era, which was really, in my view, following Brown when we came to understand or appreciate that the politics may be hard at times, but it isn't rocket science. What actually gives rise to the kinds of schools all parents want? It helps if we have quality teachers who are actually prepared, you know, to teach in the subject they’re assigned to. It helps if we have supports for groups—special populations, to think of it one way. English language learners, kids from low-income and underserved populations, special education, right? These were things that the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act actually, in 1964, endeavored to do: level the playing field and respond to the emerging diversity in our public school enrollments. Right?

Then we got into arguments about minimal competency standards. Those gave rise to discussions about common standards, and here we find ourselves. You know, today, I think one or two important differences between these ongoing struggles and the moment in which we find ourselves would be this. We've had debates and book bans in the past. It's been unusual to find our political leaders, some of them on the forefront in legislating them. That hasn't been something that public officials have been provoked or inclined to do, and nor do I think we've debated about who ought to have access to what kind of public education. But I'm stunned by the sudden willingness to debate whether public education is what we should actually have. So those would be two ways of distinguishing the sort of story I've told you with the moment in which we find ourselves and and I think that, to me, should suggest that there's a new kind of urgency that we should bring to the work that I expect we'll talk more about as we continue with this. This conversation.

Katie (Host) 

So helpful. Yeah. Zoe, what would you add to that?

Zoe
Yeah. I mean, well, I think, to build into this moment, one is a reminder to all of us that what is happening in our public school system always affects all of us, all the time. It builds the communities we want. It builds our economic prosperity. Ultimately, it builds our democracy because 90% of the 55 million school-aged children in the U.S. are attending our public schools.

The other thing to acknowledge is that those kids are becoming even more diverse. So, when Kent said in 1964, when we passed the first big federal law around public education, we were calling out that different students had different needs, and we needed to attend to those. And today, we just have much more diversity in our public schools.

So, I think it is not a wonder then that, coming out of 2020, capitalizing on the maybe legitimate concerns parents had about what happened during COVID and their frustrations with the public education system—but also intersecting with a rising racial reckoning in our country—we saw this emerging backlash that really centered on public education.

Suddenly, as Kent mentioned, we had legislators across the country passing these censorship and gag order bills that were limiting how and what could be taught about an honest history, as well as how we represent young people’s and families’ experiences across race and LGBTQ status. Ultimately, this created a massive chilling effect that isn’t just operating in the states where these laws have passed, which is now over 50% of the young people in our country. These students are going to school every day in a state where we’ve limited this major way that we build a sense of belonging and connection. Frankly, it also affects how we build the skills our young people need to succeed in the economy and in our democracy, which is: How do you get along with lots of different people? How do you understand different people's perspectives? How do you understand the road we've traveled to build the America that we have today, and the road we have left to go?

All of these are things we do because we build communities of belonging and connection, but also because we're honest and clear about the history of our country. And so much of that is under attack today for a really politically motivated reason.

But I think sometimes people think, well, that’s a core set of states. It’s now, I think, up to 17 states—it may even be higher—but the chilling effect is much more profound. So in surveys of teachers, what we’re hearing from teachers across the country is that they feel less comfortable talking about these issues of race, identity, and dealing with current events related to them. I think that diminishes everyone's education quite substantially, and it diminishes the role that public schools can play in our lives as Americans.

And I'll just say one thing. I mean, the people behind this effort have been really clear. They're not hiding the ball on their strategy. So people may not follow folks like Christopher Rufo and others who have articulated this strategy. But I encourage folks to go read articles about what they're up to because they've said: "Our goal is to erode people's trust, create universal distrust in public education in order to create universal support for choice and privatization in public education."

So, there’s a political project happening here. I often go back to Heather McGee's concept of the dynamic of drained-pool politics. If folks haven’t read Heather McGee's book The Sum of Us, I think it really effectively describes the dynamic we’re watching in our country right now, and that we need to really contend with. Is this the direction that we want to go? Heather uses the metaphor of drained pools and says:

"In the post-Jim Crow desegregation period in our country, cities and towns all over the country were in an arms race to build the biggest, most fabulous, luxurious community public pools. Of course, they were only accessible to white people in our country. Once they were forced to make those community pools—those community assets—accessible to everyone, places where everyone would be welcome and supported, suddenly many cities and towns across the country sold those pools for $1 to turn them into private pools that only certain people—largely white, affluent people—could access. Or they filled those pools in with concrete in order to eliminate that asset rather than share it."

I worry quite a bit about the fact that this is the underlying dynamic happening in our country. If we have to share this resource, if we really have to make it work for every American, if we have to tell everyone's story in our history, if we have to make everyone feel welcome and like their story belongs here in America, then we’d rather dismantle this institution that educates all of our children. I think we will all be deeply diminished. Just like if you don’t have a great, fancy pool in your community anymore, I think we’ll all be deeply diminished if that is really successful.

The good news is, I think, that we know from public polling this is not the direction that parents want to see us move in America. They want a place where all students are valued and accepted in our public schools. They want a curriculum that teaches their child how to interact and understand the perspectives of different folks. They know that that matters to their growing up and succeeding in their lives, and they don’t want politicians dictating what is taught in their classroom. But it's a distraction from the things that I think parents really do want us working on.

Katie (Host)
That’s such a good point. I really appreciate both of you laying out, again, understanding current challenges within the long arc. There’s a history of what has come before, and at the same time, the stakes couldn’t be any higher. I love, Zoe, that you referenced Heather, and really just this point that we all suffer—not just some of us, but all of us.

Now, I want to turn to that. As education funders and funders in the philanthropic space, how are your institutions responding to the current set of challenges? Can you talk about some of the efforts that you both have been involved in together that required shifting strategies as the context shifts? Maybe this is where you two could talk about the many ways that your two institutions—and the two of you—are working together to respond.

Zoe
I mean, first, I'll say I spend a lot of time listening to and learning from Kent, and I think this is an important part of doing this work. Like, when I first met Kent 10 years ago in my own philanthropic journey, I think one of the things he really imparted to me—and then I think I've even more deeply recognized—is that this history really matters.

You know, I started my career in education in 2000 when I graduated from college. Kent can tell that story because he lived through multiple chapters before that. And I think sometimes in education philanthropy—and frankly, in education change broadly in the field—we can be ahistorical and fail to recognize that whenever we came into the conversation is not the beginning of the conversation.

I think one of the things that makes Kent and my work together—and just, you know, has enriched my work so much—is recognizing that we are part of this long effort, this long project, to build opportunity structures into America that really deliver on the American promise. It's an imperfect project, and it's hard and slow. There are champions and opportunities, and there is opposition. I think just acknowledging that has been really critical.

I think because Kent and I were in that conversation, and we were already thinking together and funding together around things like, "How do we support bold coalitions in states who are fighting for full and fair funding of public education?"—which is an underlying root cause of why we don't have that opportunity structure across our country—when we saw this backlash emerging, I think we had already been doing work together. We were very proximate to leaders who could tell us, "This is what's happening."

We heard at the very beginning of the legislative session in 2021, and we had relationships with each other and with a broader group of funders. So we could lean in and say, "Well, what do we need to learn? What do we need to understand better? How do we listen to our partners in the field and begin to think about what the field needs now?"

If, you know, a political strategy is being driven to build fear and aim for a broader kind of privatization effort in public education, what do we need to know and understand? I think then we had a lot of partners across the field who could help us understand that better.

Initially, we launched a community of practice—a group of partners who were just coming together to hear from our partners from lots of different perspectives. Superintendents who were leading to try to make their education systems ones that worked for every kid in their community were up against this kind of manufactured political attack on them and on public education.

We were hearing from legal scholars and litigators, understanding what’s happening with these laws and what can be done. Folks were helping us think about narrative—what’s happening in the misinformation being driven about public education, and how do you counter it? To raise the voice of the majority of parents who, you know, want an inclusive public education system but don't know how to get their voices heard as loudly as, perhaps, the Moms for Liberty chapter in their community.

So, you know, we spent a lot of time listening and co-constructing strategy. Today, we've got a fund called the Ed Future Fund. It has a broad community of practice of funders who come together to keep learning, keep aligning our strategies, and then we pool funds. We fund a growing strategy that is really raising the voices of the parents, young people, and advocates who want to see their public schools focus on the most important things for their kids and build inclusive environments for their kids to go to school.

And so, that's a bit of what we've been doing. I'll hand it over to Kent for more on that.

Kent
Well, let me see. Let me add around the edges of that. I mean, the first thing I need to say, just to make Zoe's opening point, is that Heather's mom and I are friends.

Zoe
That sounds right.

Kent
So I lived the experience Heather's story tells. If I had time, I could tell you about trying to buy a house in Lansing, Michigan. We could send my very light-complected mother in one day, and the rest of us would show up the next and get a very cool reception to whether or not this was something we could do. Or I could tell a story—my mother could for sure—about whether it was easy or not to get a loan, you know, to get a mortgage, right? Etc., etc.

So I remember reading that book and going through the conversations with this community of practice with other grantmakers, you know, feeling like, struggling to figure out how to bring my own truth into that conversation just because I had history other people in the conversation didn’t have. It means that I've probably been playing a bridging function some of the time, you know, between people in philanthropy a long time to folks more recently arrived, between actors in the civil rights community, where I have deep ties. But there are intergenerational dynamics that are alive and well there, which is both important and complicates the work.

We may see the same problems, but we bring different theories about how we ought to work on them. At a time when we desperately need to be more aligned, more unified, better at what to argue about, and much better at consolidating our energies and our resources, I have found that that takes work—helping people overcome different ideas about what to do and how to get something done.

Part of your question was about, you know, what journey was Hewlett on? And, you know, it was interesting to me. I went there questioning the extent to which I could be in the equity business I had long been in. When I got there, I questioned whether or not I ought to go there. I'm glad I did.

I seem to understand that this is a place that places bets on the people, you know, that arrive, and they give you lots of space to do what you think is best. And still, 2020 changed something at Hewlett. You know, there was a kind of soul-searching that occurred. There were conversations in the staff that you had to hear, you had to put—you had to make room for them. And there were conversations in the board, you know, a sense-making about the moment. Katie, the work you came to help us with, I would argue, was a byproduct of that moment, as the whole foundation decided that, you know, we needed to think not just about, well, do we deal with equity over here in this program and racial justice in that program, but rather, how are these questions of social justice and equity present across the programs and initiatives in the foundation?

I think, as you would agree, that's a journey that we’re very much still on. The point I want to make about it, though, is that it gave me more license. I could become substantially more efficient and direct about how to talk about this, about what to do. I felt like the memos—let me tell you—if you know that rates, I think, you know, that's a very efficient place. I mean, I think they use decks, you know, and they just get the stuff out there. And they, you know, you know, our board books are like dissertations. You know, they’re 3,250 pages each one.

So words are our currency. You know, memoranda is the coin of the realm. I'll just say it this way: writing them in certain ways became harder because I wanted to use my license well and powerfully. I wanted to be clear. I wanted those memoranda to be educative, right? And in some ways, writing those memos became easier because I didn’t have to mince so many words. I could get right to the point.

So now what I'm doing is I'm sort of juxtaposing Hewlett’s journey and Kent’s. Right? It’s the ability to sort of bring myself more fully and completely into Hewlett’s work, at least with regard to our own program, and I think to some degree with regard to the larger community inside the foundation. My ability to talk with candor and ease and humility, I think, made it easier for my peers to do the same. You know, what they understood, what they didn’t understand, what they’re trying to figure out, so forth.

Finally, I had to work with Zoe because, you know, I needed a partner. I needed a partner out there who had the time, energy, and sophistication to get people organized. And if I could bring resources to all of that—and I committed to bringing as many resources as I could to it—it was a good way to sort of collaborate and help get the field, you know, better put together.

Zoe
Yeah, I mean, and I'll say Kent is really masterful at both of these things. I mean, managing the internal working environment—is that a master class or what? But also in working with me, you know, I'm kind of like the workhorse—I’m going to do the deck, right? And move the things. What I really appreciate is that we can have a relationship where Kent's wisdom, analysis, and lived experience shape so much of what I can benefit from. Then, by extension, the way our ED Future Fund strategy has emerged is smarter and more strategic because everyone at that table is contributing a superpower, right? We are able to drive a more sophisticated, field-wide strategy that bridges different people's perspectives, expertise, and lived experience, and that makes it really unique. It's something I don't think we could do independently. There are so many places where, you know, I didn't fund civil rights organizations and legal challenges until, you know, it was needed and required for some of this work. Kent, did you know we have partners sitting around our table who've really thought about narrative shifts, and how do we measure it, and how do we drive it? I think we all benefit because we bring those different perspectives to the field, and I think that has made the work so much better. Yeah.

Kent
I try, Katie, to work in the background. I mean, there are lots of folks I'll go and talk to, you know, and I'll tell them, "Do what Zoe does," yeah, don’t struggle with this. You don't need to struggle with this.

Katie (Host)
You're such a good team. Well, I just so appreciate the story that you're telling. I know we're talking specifically about the education space, but I think there are so many practical applications for funders working in other aspects of racial justice or equity issues. So a lot of the themes that I'm hearing from you are that these are much larger issues. History matters. The current window of opportunity matters. And working in the ecosystem approach, where, you know, you're not treating these as almost technical problems—like I know when I entered philanthropy two decades ago, a lot of funders were treating this as, "What’s the most strategic lever, and how do we balance that?" And then if we do that, it almost seems like treating a lot of these problems as technical or even complicated problems. I think what the picture that you're painting is that it’s a lot more complicated. It’s, you know, it’s the adaptive challenge of the problem statement, always changing depending on current context. So what's really important is proximity. What's really important is relationship. What's really important is emergence. And so I’m wondering if you both can talk about that—like, what have you seen as the shift in how funders have had to respond, given the nature of the challenges today? And while it sounds great, it could also be really hard because now you're talking, you know, the kind of work that's required, the kind of collaboration that’s required is so much bigger than just even your own institution. So, I’m wondering, what lessons learned have you observed? Yeah, what advice would you have for other people, even in other spaces, who are trying to do this adaptive work?

Kent
You know, I do think that the longer pattern has been for us to work in our own buckets, our own silos. There's a certain foundation tendency to push us in that direction. Maybe a better way to say it is we all have our own accountability structures. We all have our own origin stories. Therefore, we all have a set of things that were commissioned, you know, by mission, to do. Learning to hold those dear and also learning to work with each other—that’s a new muscle. The muscles that I think we’re getting better at. I’m not suggesting it has never been true; that’s certainly not the case. But if one thing the pandemic taught us, a racial awakening brought you, and a profound and sustained backlash to all of that taught us, it’s that whatever our particular strategic interests and priorities might be, the idea that any of us are going to achieve them by working in isolation is not going to work. I think that’s an important and, hopefully, increasingly shared insight.

In fact, Hewlett has a fund called the Fund for Shared Insight, based on the very premise that we’re much more likely to create the world that we all want to live in and achieve the things we want to achieve and solve the problems that are important and dear to us when, a) we have a healthy respect and understanding of what each other aspires to do, and b) we dedicate more time and energy to appreciating the connections between and among those things, and c) we actually create time, space, and resources to come together around things that contribute to our individual and collective impact. And so I would say that’s a work in progress. It’s not guaranteed. People like Zoe view what I just said as steady work.

Zoe
Right? Yeah, we just keep at it.

Kent
And you’ve got to keep at it and get better and better at showing the return.