Chief Chat: Benita Flucker

Benita Flucker is the chief equity and inclusion officer at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), the education publishing and technology company. In an interview with HR Brew, she discussed her approach to the job and the importance of DE&I for a company’s products and services.

How do you approach your role as chief equity and inclusion officer for an education company?

My focus is on ensuring that at HMH we build a culture that is inclusive and that is full of really diverse and broad representation…The other key piece for me is to support HMH’s customers and our business on the equity and inclusion side, so that means making sure that our content, our programs, our services, all reflect the diverse populations that we serve in the education space.

Why is it important for HMH’s products and services to be part of your DE&I mission?

[All children] deserve the right to have an education that is equitable, that is inclusive, and that allows them to see not only themselves today, but also have an opportunity to see what they could become, what their futures could look like, etcetera. When I talk about “inclusion” and “equity,” they mean very specific things for us, and for me. Diversity is all about absolute representation. That could be our ethnicity [or] our heritages. It could also be about our interests, and the things that we preference, and our lived experiences.

Inclusion, to me, is about making sure, especially for students, that when they enter a classroom…they feel like they belong. They feel respected, they feel they have agency, they feel people can see them, and educators are meeting students where they are. So, students don’t feel like they have to assimilate. They can come in as they are and feel like they are welcome.

Equity is…if I’m in a classroom and I have a a visual need or I happen to speak a different language or I need some other kind of support, that those supports are available, that educators understand how to provide those supports…Equity means that I as a student am seen, I’m included, but the educator also knows that in the classroom, there are some additional supports…To me, that’s important because if you can get those things right…the whole child has an opportunity to understand and to learn and there are no impediments to that learning, and that’s a right, that’s not a privilege. That is a basic right, and so that’s why it’s important.

How do you incorporate DE&I into the company’s product offerings?

We have a research organization that is 100% focused on understanding how students grow, how students learn, what are the best ways, what are the best methodologies. And that kind of information is helpful for us as we build curriculum and as we build content.

We also do a couple of other things by way of measurement [which] are a little less numeric and more about engagement with the community. We often bring in focus groups. We bring in students to do user testing of some of our programs and our content. We bring in parents, we bring in educators, we have review panels that look at our program, give us advice, give us feedback about what are some of the ways we can either make it more inclusive or more impactful. [And] one of the things that I lead is an effort called content equity, inclusion, and diversity.

How do you stay on top of DE&I trends or best practices during these uncertain times?

There is no playbook. Having spent the last five or six years really building out this work around review and elevation of our content and our program, that was super helpful. I love to read and I love to consume lots and lots of information. And I like to belong to organizations like Innovation For Equity, and I do some speaking, consultation, and advisory boards, etcetera.

One of the things that I was fortunate enough to take advantage of was identifying some of those networks [to learn from] other people who are doing this work, what have they learned, what are some mistakes that they’ve made, [so that] maybe I can bring those to bear here. And Innovation For Equity—that has been immensely rewarding to have that network of folks who can help me think about what this should be like for HMH, and also give to those other entrepreneurs and ed-tech leaders to help give them advice about some of the opportunities and things [they’re] struggling with.