As a child, Nandi Stewart planned to become a Supreme Court Justice. She was studying abroad and surrounded by students from Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa — when she realized that public education was her calling.

“We were talking about education, and I realized that our system was broken,” she said. “I decided I was going to work on improving education for students who looked like me and who grew up in the same types of neighborhoods as me.”

After Stewart graduated from Spelman College in 2013, she joined Teach For America (TFA), where she taught in a high school that was only a few miles from the magnet school she attended growing up in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

“Even though I went to school three miles away from the high school I teach at, I never visited it. I didn’t understand the deficits my peers had. It was an eye-opening experience for me,” she said.

Stewart was tapped as the chair of the English department her second year. Now, she’s enrolled in a doctoral program at Howard University in education administration. Her goal is to become an urban school district superintendent — and eventually the U.S. secretary of education.

She said TFA prepared her to take on leadership roles in education, and is working to address the most important problem affecting America.

“All of the economic, social problems we have start with education,” she said. “If this can be fixed, our nation would be in a better place.”