My friend Mildred Otero has spent most of her career dedicated to improving education.

As a staff around Capitol Hill, at the State Department, and now as the senior vice president

of national impact leadership for education equity, Mildred has cultivated incredible insights

about how you advance causes you believe in, stand firm, even when it means standing in

opposition to your friends, and the key to productive negotiations.

Thank you. opposition to your friends and the key to productive negotiations. I want to start with you as a kid.

I'm going to go out on the limb and guess you were a very good student and that you love school.

Is that right?

Um, love. You know, I don't know if love. I would say like, I'm okay being wrong.

Yeah, no, no. I would say, you know, I talk about this a lot because of the work I currently do.

I am a survivor of the New York City public school system.

Tell me more.

And I didn't even realize it until I got to college.

I'll give you one example.

There's a recent podcast called Dear White Parents.

That middle school was my middle school in Brooklyn.

So I literally cried through most of that podcast because I

understood, I literally had to walk through two public housing complexes before I would get to my

middle school every morning and every afternoon. It was juxtaposed in this really wealthy area

surrounded by a lot of poverty. And it's just so indicative of New York City and the way, you know, lines are drawn and where

kids end up. I was a survivor because I was actually living educational inequity and I didn't even know it.

And then I went to high school and in high school I literally met a teacher who is a mentor and a friend to this day who really like just

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