“If you say that there’s structural racism, institutional racism, systemic racism, then I have to insist on one other kind of racism. And that is surmountable racism,” says Ian Rowe, co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-focused, International Baccalaureate high schools in the Bronx.
Prior to this, he was CEO of the Public Prep charter school network for ten years.
“What we owe to young people is to tell them the truth about those behaviors that are far more correlated to success: education, work, faith, family formation, usually marriage before children,” Rowe says.
Last year, New York’s state and city teachers unions sued to block the creation of his new school system. But less than a week before the school was set to open, Rowe’s legal team won a decisive victory.
All students at Vertex Partnership Academies take a special course called Pathways to Power.
“There are no victims in our school, only architects of their own lives,” Rowe says.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/ian-rowe-were-handicapping-children-with-victimhood-narratives-instead-of-teaching-them-how-to-succeed_5087162.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Ian Rowe: Welcome to Vertex Partnership Academies, which we are growing into what will be a world-class International Baccalaureate high school. We’re in District 12 in the Bronx. Something really important to know about this district, only 7 per cent graduated from high school, ready for college. And so, we thought it was very, very important to create a new opportunity, a new educational institution focused on excellence for more families who are desperate for their kids to have a shot at the American dream. Therefore we created this option, and now we’re here.
We’ve opened Vertex Partnership Academies in a beautiful old Catholic school. This building is the old Blessed Sacrament School, which was built about 100 years ago. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor actually was a student here from kindergarten through eighth grade. It’s quite inspiring for our students to know that a Supreme Court justice was educated in this school, in this building. Unfortunately, the Blessed Sacrament School closed about a decade ago. We are revitalizing the building and revitalizing the school, because this is now our home for Vertex Partnership Academies.
Jan Jekielek: Do you think that one school can nudge that 7 per cent number?
Mr. Rowe: My hope is that we can build an entire network of great new high schools. This is just the first one, but you have to start. We’re in a community where, yes, only 7 per cent of kids are graduating from high school ready for college. But we know that 100 per cent of all kids are capable of achieving their highest levels.
We need to build institutions like Vertex Partnership Academies that demand excellence, and that don’t lower expectations. There are no victims in our schools, only architects of their own lives. That’s what we are really trying to cultivate in our kids.
Mr. Jekielek: I found it really interesting as I was walking through, in the staircase you have a set of values that expand on these four cardinal virtues.
Mr. Rowe: Yes, sometimes the word indoctrination is used in a negative way. We’re trying to indoctrinate our kids into the four cardinal virtues, plus also something called the International Baccalaureate learner profile. These are the kinds of characteristics that we want our students to develop; resiliency, good communication, and community-mindedness. Because school is about academics; math, science, language and literature. And it’s about the habits of mind, the virtues, and the character-based strengths that we want our kids to develop.
Mr. Jekielek: You said a whole bunch of things I want to follow up on. I’m going to start with this, “Agency is an empowering alternative to the narrative of equity.” There is so much to unpack here.
Mr. Rowe: We’re living in a time where there are these dominant narratives, that particularly for young people, are pushing this idea that you’re simply a victim. There are these forces in our country that are so overwhelming, so powerful, and so discriminatory that you, as an individual, are immobilized because of your race, your gender, and also as a result of listening to this narrative. As someone that runs schools in the heart of the Bronx, where kids are hearing these messages all the time about everything that they can’t do in their life, I’ve really come around to believe this idea of agency can be a much more empowering alternative. It’s a tool that you have to walk a path of prosperity in our country.
Mr. Jekielek: Agency, it’s almost like a different worldview. Because on one hand, you have this idea that you can act and change your reality, whatever your situation may be. And the other view is that you’re given what you have and you’re stuck with it.
Mr. Rowe: I like to describe the two narratives that I see out there, what I describe as blame the system, or blame the victim. With the blame the system ideology, that’s a view of our country. It’s a view of America as a place that’s inherently oppressive. Based on your race, your class, and your gender, there are these systems that are just rigged against you. Maybe if you’re black, there’s a white supremacist lurking on every corner. Capitalism is evil. These systems are so discriminatory and so oppressive that you have no agency, and you have no independent ability to lead your own life.
But on the other side, there’s this other narrative that I call blame the victim. In that narrative, America is great. America is not the problem, you’re the problem. There’s some pathology that you have. You haven’t pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. You haven’t taken advantage of all the opportunities that exist in this great country. And so, between blame the system and blame the victim, either you are powerless against these systems, or it’s your fault that you have not been able to take advantage of these opportunities that exist in America.
I find both of these narratives dangerous for our country, because it robs young people of this idea that they can lead a self-determined life. I define agency as the force of your free will guided by moral discernment—the force of your free will guided by moral discernment. If you think of agency like a vector or velocity, velocity is not just speed, it’s speed and direction. If you, as a young person, are starting to think about your life and you know that you’ve got free will, but how are you going to wield that will towards the right direction?
Agency is what I like to believe in. If we can cultivate a new age of agency in our country, we would have a much more optimistic, future-oriented generation that is rising. But the key point is that agency doesn’t just come from nowhere. We all have free will, but there are lots of people that exercise free will that aren’t good people. So, how do you learn how to become a morally discerning person?
That’s why I’ve created this framework that I call F.R.E.E., which is really focused on the key institutions that help young people develop agency; family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship. We can go into each of those, but those are the four pillars that if we were to invest in them as a society, we would start to see a whole generation of young people move away from this ideology of victimhood and dependency and grievance to hope, empowerment, and agency.
Mr. Jekielek: The blame the victim narrative that you describe is talking about people needing to exercise agency, make decisions for themselves, and overcome their victimhood. Please explain to me the problem with this view.
Mr. Rowe: Blame the victim, in some ways, is infantilizing the very people that you’re talking about. Let’s talk about race and crime. Unfortunately, there are disproportionate numbers of black men that are incarcerated relative to their percentage in the population. There are those that say, “That’s just a result of systemic racism.” It’s almost as if they have no power. They’re just in a system that’s driving them towards achieving those outcomes.
And if you have any other answer to the problem other than structural discrimination, then you’re blaming the victim. You’re blaming them for the very circumstances that they’re in. The thing is, at some point, there has to be some kind of personal responsibility. There has to be some recognition that an individual is making a decision towards a certain type of behavior.
For example, I study the implosion of the family in certain segments of our society. The nonmarital birth rate in our country for women 24 and under has been in the 70 per cent range for well over a decade. It’s 61 per cent of white women and 91 per cent of black women, 24 and under. These numbers are staggering.
When you point these types of data out, some people say, “That’s just the result of the conditions that they are in.” I say, “That might be true and we need to work on structural factors.” And again, I can talk about some things that I would certainly work on. But we can’t ignore the fact that if people are making decisions to have children they are a player, they are an architect in their own outcomes. Some people say, “Well, you’re blaming the victim.”
I say, “No, we just have to acknowledge that when we’re looking at social conditions, we have to analyze the role of structural barriers, while also recognizing the importance of individual decision-making and personal responsibility.” This is why I run schools. I run schools to let kids know that they can do hard things, that they aren’t just, as Martin Luther King says, “Flotsam and jetsam on the river of life,” and that they just go with the flow. They have the ability to turn the tide, even if their circumstances may suggest otherwise.
Mr. Jekielek: What you’re saying is there are structural things and we need to be honest about them, and look at the actual data from studies, like the ones you’ve described. Irrespective of those realities, there are also tools for people to use to transcend some of those realities.
Mr. Rowe: 100 per cent.
Mr. Jekielek: Right?
Mr. Rowe: 100 per cent.
Mr. Jekielek: And it’s not a black and white situation.
Mr. Rowe: No. What we’ve lost in our country is the ability to deal with this nuance. In New York City, there is a legislative cap right now on starting a public charter school. If you had a great idea to open a great school to serve all these kids that need more high quality educational options, you couldn’t do it. That’s an example of a real structural barrier. That is a policy barrier, and that’s why we should be fighting for school choice, fighting for more educational freedom. A seven-year-old can’t solve that problem on their own.
That’s an example of a structural barrier that I acknowledge. But that doesn’t take the seven-year-old off the hook for being able to go to school, apply themselves, and be supported by a family and community that will help them thrive. I run schools to create environments to help kids build that capacity which overcomes that mindset.
That’s what I say, we can acknowledge structural barriers, which today, by the way, are often not on the dimension of race as much as it’s often purported to be. But as an example, as relates to education, that’s a real example of a barrier. But we have to fight that battle simultaneously along with cultivating this idea of agency within young people who need to succeed regardless of their circumstances.
Mr. Jekielek: We’re going to talk about the school battle, because this is something that you faced directly.
Mr. Rowe: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: In your understanding, what is the reason for these astounding numbers of children being born out of wedlock in our society at large?
Mr. Rowe: That’s a profound question. It has not always been this way. It was in the 1960s in the black community that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the Department of Labor at the time, did an analysis. It was focused on the black family. And in particular, he was focused on those segments of the black community that seemed to be entrenched in poverty and dysfunctional behavior, generation after generation.
He found a deep correlation between poverty and these dysfunctional behaviors, a cycle of disadvantage. He found a deep correlation between those behaviors and this growing nonmarital birth rate that existed within the black community. At that time in the mid-60s, the nonmarital birth rate in the black community was 23.6 per cent. He said, “Crisis, crisis, crisis.” He tried to bring out a loudspeaker. “We have to address this issue, because we aren’t addressing this issue. This is at the core.”
What’s interesting is that the terminology of blaming the victim emanated right after he put this data out. Because all these critics came forward and said, “All you’re doing is blaming these black people for being victims of situations that they didn’t create. It’s because of a legacy of discrimination, and it’s because of contemporary racism.”
Literally, the term blame the victim emerged out of the criticism of that report. The nonmarital birth rate within the black community today in 2023 is more than 70 per cent. In the white community, it’s close to 30 per cent, even far higher than the rates that existed in the 1960s that Moynihan was talking about.
Why has that happened? Cultural mores have certainly shifted. There’s a very interesting study that Janet Yellen and her Nobel Prize-winning husband, George Akerlof, did in the 1990s trying to understand this question. They saw skyrocketing nonmarital birth rates, as well as deep correlations with poverty and dysfunctional behavior and crime. They came to the conclusion in their analysis that it was reproductive technology shock. It would be very interesting if the same study were done today.
But they claimed that it was the advent of the pill and abortion that fundamentally changed the relationship between men and women. Heretofore, in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, if a man and woman were to come together and have a baby, there was almost this implicit agreement beforehand that if this happens, we’re getting married, therefore the whole idea of the shotgun wedding.
As more options started to be created when an unplanned pregnancy occurred, it shifted where we often talk about a woman’s right to choose. And men started to have the right to choose by saying, “If you now have the option of an abortion and you’re not choosing one, then I am stepping away from my responsibility.”
You can see in the data what has shifted over these last 30, 40, 50 years in terms of what occurs when an unplanned or an unwanted pregnancy comes about. It used to be that marriage was a top option, or adoption was an option. That has now been flipped, in that abortion and single parenthood are almost always a significant percent of cases. This is now across race the choices being made by young women and men.
That’s why you see such declining rates of marriage, particularly in low-income communities. This is something that we as educators and leaders have to restore and re-emphasize—the role of family and the timing of family formation for the rising generation. This all ties back to this idea of agency. Because if you’re a young person growing up in an unstable family without high quality choices in education and not rooted in a faith community, it’s really hard to lead a life of your own choosing, because you don’t have the building blocks to help you build that sense of agency.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s hard to even imagine what that would really look like.
Mr. Rowe: In 2016, I had been running a network of public charter schools for about six years and we were doing quite well. In terms of academics, we had maybe a couple of hundred open seats each year, but we had nearly 5,000 people on our wait list each year. People were desperate to send their kids to a great school. We decided to move our headquarters from Tribeca in Manhattan to the South Bronx, because that’s where there was such a huge demand for our schools.
I’ll always remember on July 11th, 2016, we had this epiphany moment where we decided to take the team out on a walking tour to get to know our new neighborhood. Where’s the local deli? Where’s the local bank? We were now going to be in this neighborhood and our team was a little apprehensive, because there was a needle exchange right on the corner where our new office was. But this is where our school was going to be, so this is where our headquarters should be.
As we were on this walking tour, we saw in the distance this baby blue, 27-foot Winnebago truck with all these people around it that were excited to see it. What is that? It’s almost like the ice cream truck, but these were adults. As we got closer, we saw graffiti lettering on the side of the truck that said, “Who’s Your Daddy?” What is that?
It turned out, Who’s Your Daddy, is a mobile DNA testing center where low-income folks were spending somewhere between $350 to $500 to ask questions like, “Could you be my sister? Are you my father?” Literally, these were like DNA tests being given so that people could answer fundamental questions about who is their family. And so, when you ask, “Are kids even seeing models?” Absolutely.
These kids are growing up in different environments; the Bronx, Appalachia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and all over the country. The nonmarital birth rate in this section of the Bronx was 84.5 per cent. If kids aren’t seeing enough models about what the building blocks are for family, not to mention all the other pathologies that they may be exposed to, how is it that we can expect them to develop the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that lead to a life of flourishing?
This is why we have to recognize there are structural barriers, while also still holding kids accountable for their own behavior. But don’t put kids in such a situation that you’re not acknowledging some of these factors, and when they don’t have the models to reinforce what their behavior should be.
Mr. Jekielek: As you’re saying all this, I keep coming back to this idea that the structural barriers that we’re told about, these narratives are actually just simply untrue. They’re almost like a distraction from the really difficult barriers that actually do exist.
Mr. Rowe: Yes. Let’s take Nikole Hannah-Jones. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a recognized reporter for the New York Times. She was the lead writer for a project that the New York Times did, called “The 1619 Project.” She’s a big proponent of reparations, which is a multi-trillion dollar program where black people should just be paid money by the government as restitution for slavery and past discrimination. She wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine called, “What We Are Owed.” It’s all about the rationale for reparations.
She says that it doesn’t matter what a black person does. A black person basically is powerless to close the racial wealth gap. It doesn’t matter if you get married, it doesn’t matter if you save, it doesn’t matter if you buy a home, and it doesn’t matter if you get educated. None of those things will matter or none of those things can help “close or address 400 years of racialized plundering.” Like, whoa.
And of course, mind you, Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her own personal life, has done all of those things to lead a life of flourishing. And good for her, because she’s recognized that whatever barriers there are, there certainly seems to be a pathway that creates a much greater likelihood of success, even for the kid who’s in the poorest of conditions, not born into the “most stable family structure.”
And yet, the narrative that’s often given is that these people are not succeeding because of structural this or structural that. I often like to say, “Okay, if you say that there is structural racism, institutional racism, and systemic racism, then I have to insist on one other kind of racism, and that is surmountable racism. Unfortunately, racism or other forms of discrimination are a part of the human condition, and it’s practiced by people of all races.
And yet, there are also tens of millions of people that seem to be flourishing in their lives despite these challenges. Why? What is it that we can learn from people who seem to succeed? That is the central question that I often find the opponents of some of my ideas not willing to explore.
Mr. Jekielek: As you say this, I’m thinking about the central tenets of the Woodson Center, and I know you’re a part of the Woodson Center too, and I was very happy to learn that. This methodology of finding the people who flourish in really difficult circumstances, figuring out what they’re doing, and empowering them to do more of it just seems like something we should be doing a lot more of.
Mr. Rowe: If you really want to be intellectually honest, if you really are really focused on finding solutions to any range of social pathologies or social issues, you have to start with the premise that not everyone is in prison, not everyone is poor, and not everyone is being raised in a broken marriage.
Or if there’s a substantial group of people, even if they’re in the minority overall, but if there’s still a substantial number that seem to be leading a life of flourishing under conditions that seem to have others succumb, or you’re saying that’s the reason that others are succumbing, then there must be something to learn.
For example, we often talk about poverty within the black community. It turns out that for nearly 30 years, the poverty rate for married black couples has been in the single digits. What might we learn from that? And yet, 70 per cent of kids in the black community are born into nonmarital households. Maybe we should think about the role of family formation as something we should be strongly advocating for, and then go even further.
There’s something called the success sequence which some of your viewers might be familiar with. Many of your viewers may not know the term, but they certainly know the series of behaviors, because they may have practiced it in their own lives. But basically, if you finish just your high school degree, then get a full-time job of any kind, you learn the dignity and discipline of work. And then, if you have children with marriage first, the data shows that 97 per cent of millennials that follow that series of decisions avoid poverty. And the vast majority enter the middle-class or beyond.
That certainly seems like valuable information young people should learn not as a prescriptive, like you must do this, but as a descriptive, saying, “Look, you are going to face a whole series of decisions in your life. We want to make sure you’re equipped with that body of evidence that shows people with the same conditions as you have made these kinds of decisions and flourished.
For some reason, the people who are the gatekeepers of information say, “No, no, no, you can’t teach that to these kids. You’ll somehow be embarrassing them.” Like, no. I fight against these kinds of ideas. Let’s not do what Nikole Hannah-Jones did. I say to her, “You are not preaching what you’ve practiced in your own life. In fact, you’re preaching something else and that’s harmful to kids.”
Mr. Jekielek: Every self-help book has this idea of exercising agency as a central tenet, however, it’s constructed. There’s no self-help book that says you don’t have to take control of your life to do something.
Mr. Rowe: Or that you have to wait for somebody else before you can be free.
Mr. Jekielek: The people that are teaching the victimhood mentality, they’re not practicing what they preach. They’re actually doing this opposite thing.
Mr. Rowe: Correct. It’s astounding to me. I may have to do a few papers on this. It’s astounding to me. The people who are often advocating for the powerlessness of certain communities in their own personal lives have exhibited the behaviors of power. And what I mean by that, typically, you have finished your education, you’ve had full-time work, and you typically have some kind of personal faith commitment. If you’ve had children, you have almost always gotten married first. But it’s not 100 per cent.
There are always exceptions. We’ve all heard the stories of the individual that was raised in a single-parent household and they beat the odds. We’ve also heard stories about kids raised in married two-parent households where the marriage was dysfunctional. So, you have to acknowledge that there’s always exceptions. There are no guarantees in life.
But what we owe to young people is to tell them the truth about those behaviors that are far more correlated to success; education, work, faith, family formation, and usually marriage before children. The people who are often out there, the big social justice activists that are claiming systemic racism, or systemic this or systemic that being the reason for all the disparities that may exist in our society, never seem to acknowledge what they have done in their own life to avoid those same challenges. And that is dripping with hypocrisy. We have to just call it out.
Mr. Jekielek: So very briefly, Pathways to Power. We’ve been talking about Pathways to Power essentially. What is this course?
Mr. Rowe: We have a class called Pathways to Power. We teach it almost like a probabilities class. With this series of decisions, here’s your likelihood of entering poverty. With this series of decisions, here’s your likelihood of entering the middle class or beyond. With this set of decisions, here’s your likelihood of really leading a life of flourishing. Our job is to make sure you are equipped with the best information. That’s what Pathways to Power is all about.
Mr. Rowe: They’re finishing up an assignment related to “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.” This has been our primary reading for the last semester. They’re learning about goal setting, overcoming challenges, and the strategies that they can deploy to be effective in their own lives. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to face challenges like every human being, but you have within your capacity the tools to make decisions where you can be successful.
Instructor: This is where we start to apply all of the work that we did with the seven habits. You’re going to look at that student’s academic profile, because that’s all you know. You just know the grades that they have as of last week. You are going to take this chart paper, and put it in the center of your table. You need to apply the seven habits to this specific student based on what you know about them, which right now is their grade. Can you stand up, Devin, please?
Student: For science, student A got one. For art, student A got one. For language and literature, that’s two. For global, two. Math, four. World language, three. And physical education, three. So, the habits we discussed.
Instructor: Tell us what does that mean to you? Like when you’re looking at that, what does that make you think before going into the habits?
Student: It makes me think that the student may have the potential to be better, but the student may need to set goals for themselves. So, the habits to discuss, be proactive. And besides to be proactive, stay off the score, get tutoring, or you can ask the teacher. For put first things first, you can prioritize their failing grade. For begin with the end in mind, you can set specific goals for tasks, be able to improve grades for different classes, or you can stay after school. And to seek to understand than to be understood, you can advocate with the teacher that you are lost so people know where or why you are confused. Complete your work and get notes from classmates.
Instructor: Good. Really good work. And what I’ll say is I didn’t see a lot of people use the habit; seek to understand, rather than to be understood.
Mr. Jekielek: This would’ve been a wonderful course for me to take.
Mr. Rowe: Oh, yes.
Mr. Jekielek: You were going to say?
Mr. Rowe: No, the truth of the matter is we are in a society today where a lot of kids across race see this narrative of America as this inherently oppressive nation, or that capitalism is evil. There’s actually something happening to our rising generation that they’re becoming much more risk-averse. They’re not starting families and they’re not starting businesses.
There is this kind of malaise, especially amongst young men. You got more kids spending more time watching pornography and playing video games. They’re not engaging in life. Even some data just came out recently that kids aren’t dating as much. There’s a lot more of a passivity culture.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a kind of safetyism. This is the term I learned from Lenore Skenazy over at Let Grow, and it’s a very real thing. And also, I might add, there is this inability to think in terms of risk-benefit or probabilities. It’s very black and white.
Mr. Rowe: Yes. It’s the binary, right. If you divide the world into that’s good or that’s bad, you lose nuance and you lose a sense of what your own role is in determining what the outcomes will be. Like, what levers are within my control? Even if for some people the outcomes might be bad, or for some people the outcomes are good, at the end of the day what energy am I putting into my own life?
And again, the message to the kids in our school is that there are no victims in our school, there are only architects of your own lives. At the end of sophomore year at Vertex Partnership Academies, our new high school, each student will have the option to choose the International Baccalaureate Diploma pathway or the International Baccalaureate Careers pathway. With the careers pathway, while you’re also still taking academic classes, you now have the opportunity to do apprenticeships or internships.
For example, the Mayo Clinic will be one of our partners where you’ll be able to choose a course of study, like for phlebotomy and how to take blood. You’ll be at a New York City-based hospital maybe one day a week, interning. At the end of your senior year of high school, you’ll be credentialed as a phlebotomist or in another discipline within the healthcare arena.
It is the whole idea that you have optionality and choice, because we want you to know that you’re not just boxed in, that you’re not just a cog in some larger system. You have agency, but there’s mutual responsibility. As a school, we are going to create some amazing opportunities for you. But you as an individual have to step up, you have to rise.
That’s where I think safetyism is coming from. There isn’t this recognition of mutual responsibility. You have to step up. You have to take advantage. And on the other side, there has to be people who are working towards your betterment by creating these opportunities. Right now, I feel that young people are not seeing enough to let them know that they have to be the curator, and they have to be the architect. And then we, as the grownups, have to make sure that we are providing the kinds of information and data that help them make better decisions.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s astounding to me to think that you almost didn’t get a chance to realize these schools. You are also putting your money where your mouth is. As I understand it, as you were developing this school, there was a potential court case you would have to face which might have prevented you from having this school up and running. And it was just 10 days before opening that you got the go-ahead. But all sorts of very large educational institutions were dead set against you doing everything we’ve just talked about.
Mr. Rowe: We’re not going to Scarsdale with this idea of building this beautiful International Baccalaureate high school. We want to go to District 12 in the Bronx where only 7 per cent of kids are graduating from high school ready for college. One would think that there would be enthusiasm for such an idea.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just clarify. There is enthusiasm amongst the parents.
Mr. Rowe: There’s enthusiasm amongst parents for sure. As always, the people who are desperate for options, especially to improve the life outcomes for their children, they’re the ones clamoring for these opportunities. No, it’s the gatekeepers, it’s the adults and grownups who have said, “No, we know what’s better. We can’t give choices because somehow that will ruin the entire system.”
Tell that to a 22-year-old mom who just wants the best for her five-year-old to start to have different choices than she had in her own life. But as it relates to Vertex Partnership Academies, we said, “Wait a minute.” There are existing charter schools that currently end at middle school and would very much like to have a guaranteed high school where they could send their students when they’re leaving eighth grade.
We said, “That makes sense.” We’ll run a world-class high school for all of your rising ninth graders, and we can do that for all these different schools that end at eighth grade. The State University of New York said, “That’s a great idea. We’re authorizing Vertex Partnership Academies to be a high school program for all these charter schools that now want to send their kids to high school.”
So, it’s not violating the cap. These are existing charters that are simply growing their grades from kindergarten through eighth grade to now kindergarten through 12th grade. It’s a very elegant, wonderful solution. It allows new charter high schools to open.
The United Federation of Teachers in New York said, “Nope, we’re going to do everything in our power to shut this down even before it opens.” So, they filed a lawsuit against us. We had gotten approval from the state in February of 2022. In March of 2022, just when we’re in the midst of recruiting staff and students, the teachers union sued to shut us down. Thankfully, we were able to get Kirkland & Ellis, which is an amazing law firm to defend us pro bono.
And yes, you’re right. The first day of school was August 22nd. August 16th was the date that a New York State Supreme Court judge had heard the case, looked through the materials, listened to what the union was saying, and completely dismissed their case, completely dismissed their case. The union chose not to appeal because they knew that there was no basis for it in the first place. But they hoped by simply bringing a lawsuit, that would be enough to bring us to our knees.
We said, “No, we are not going to stand down.” And so, we opened on August 22nd, we have 108 ninth graders, and we’ll be adding a grade every year to build a new institution in the Bronx dedicated towards educational excellence. But it’s not for the faint of heart. You have to go into this knowing that there are people who want to preserve the status quo, often the very people who claim to be advocating for the low-income kids who are in these schools. We just have to fight back.
Mr. Jekielek: Given these terrible statistics that you mentioned earlier, what possible leg is there to stand on? It strains any semblance of credulity.
Mr. Rowe: If you are a thinking person, it does. But you might just want to fall into a narrative where you gain power through victimhood. Just think of all the people who claim systemic X is the reason. When you make that your claim, you basically absolve yourself of any responsibility. If systemic racism is the reason for any disparity in outcomes in groupings by race, and you say systemic racism is a problem, then what can I do? I’m black or I’m whatever the victimized group is, and it’s all because you, the oppressor, are imposing your worldview.
In a weird sense, you gain power by consistently espousing your victimhood. There are those who generate wealth, generate notoriety and attention by continuing to claim victimhood, victimhood, victimhood. You almost have a perverse incentive never to exit. Shelby Steele said this to me in an interview I did with him. He said, “In the black community, our biggest problem isn’t racism.” He said, “Our biggest problem is freedom.”
It was really profound. He was basically saying the responsibility of freedom of now being in control of your own destiny is actually scarier than the safety of being trapped in a narrative of victimhood, where you’re constantly never asked to be responsible for your own actions. It’s always about somebody else who’s doing this to us.
Mr. Jekielek: And the incentive structure is completely upside down. This is what’s dawning on me as you’re speaking here. In a sense, this is the reason why Vertex Academies can’t be allowed to exist, because if it disproves their point so thoroughly, then their whole reason for operating comes into question.
Mr. Rowe: Right, this has been our battle running public charter schools. There are those who may say the reason low-income kids or kids of color are not doing well in school is because of structural racism or structural this or structural that. And then, along comes a network of schools that are educating the same kids in the same school buildings for even less money per pupil. Because charter schools throughout the country get less money on a per student basis than the traditional district system. And they get better outcomes, generally, but not all charter schools. So, we have to acknowledge that.
But there are a good number of charter schools that get some great outcomes under the same conditions that other systems have consistently failed kids. How else could you process that and not come to the realization that maybe there are strategies that these schools are adopting that we have something to learn from. But if you don’t believe it, your answer is shut ’em down, let’s stop them before they can even start. It doesn’t matter if the kids are in that system or just trapped in that system, that’s not my problem. Again, for many of these people, do you know where they’re sending their kids to? Private schools.
They’re moving to nice neighborhoods where they can send their kids to high-performing public schools. So again, they’re not preaching what they practice in their own life, which is that a lot of them are exercising school choice for their own children, but restricting it for kids in low-income communities. And so, we just have to fight back. When I started running schools, I thought I just needed to run great schools. Like that’s the most important thing. You start to realize that there are whole forces of people that are just determined to shut what we are doing down, and we just have to fight back.
Mr. Jekielek: In preparation for our interview, you alerted me to a kind of an amazing reality of another type of school choice that happened back under Jim Crow, which was actually incredibly effective, but then was bizarrely shut down, ostensibly, under the best intentions.
Mr. Rowe: Yes. Brown vs. Board of Education is arguably considered to be the most important Supreme Court decision of the last century, and as you say, well intentioned. This was at a time post-Jim Crow. You had conditions in schools for black children in many places that were horrific. Plessy vs. Ferguson had occurred, which basically allowed racial separation to be legal in our country, especially in schools. The Brown vs. Board of Education landmark decision basically established this premise that separate by race meant unequal. Schools separated by race were unequal, and this is where they took it one step too far, inherently inferior. So not only could a state, the government, not allow racially-segregated schools, but even schools where people had voluntarily separated themselves by race, that also was deemed unconstitutional. The reason this is important is that in the early 1900s during the Jim Crow era, black kids getting an education was horrific.
Mr. Jekielek: And there was actual systemic racism.
Mr. Rowe: And there was, oh, my God. Clearly, there was lynching, there were all sorts of terrible things that were happening in our country. And yet it’s one of the greatest examples of agency and self-sufficiency in the black community. Booker T. Washington, who had founded the Tuskegee Institute partnered with Julius Rosenwald, who at the time was the CEO of the Sears, Roebuck and Company.
Imagine in today’s world, Jeff Bezos or the head of Walmart today saying, “We are going to partner together.” Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald built nearly 5,000 schools throughout 14 states throughout the south, exclusively to educate black children. There were black professors, teachers, and principals all dedicated to this idea of excellence, regardless of the conditions in the 5,000 schools.
And while Julius Rosenwald put in money, the deal was every single school local communities had to come in, chip in money, and help build the building. There was often one schoolhouse building, or sometimes it was in churches. But the idea was there was ownership in the community. For the academic achievements of these schools, Maya Angelou was a Rosenwald graduate, as well as John Lewis. Amazing, amazing, amazing stories. The levels of academic achievement of black kids was soaring.
But after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on the premise that separate meant unequal, and separate meant inherently inferior, the Rosenwald schools, all 5,000 of them were deemed unconstitutional, and they were all shut down within a decade. Just think about that. Even in one of the most landmark decisions, these narratives of group identity must mean inferiority, or it must mean superiority oftentimes exactly hurts the very people that you claim to be wanting to help.
Mr. Jekielek: What an unbelievable story. I’m embarrassed I didn’t know it. You can’t help but wonder what the world would look like if those schools were allowed to grow and flourish and perhaps go beyond race if they so chose to.
Mr. Rowe: Exactly. It’s the idea that at the end of the day, we’re all individuals. What has slowly occurred in our country, certainly over the last decade, is that we’ve almost replaced individual dignity and personal responsibility with group identity and narratives associated with group identity. You’re no longer just an individual kid. You are white. And as a result of that, you are inherently an oppressor, you are inherently privileged regardless of all the other things that may be going on in your life. And that’s just very dangerous for our country.
With the kids in our schools, we don’t teach groups. We teach individuals with each their own capacity to feel, to achieve, to succeed, to fail, to get back up, and to be resilient. Those types of lessons are learned not because you think your entire value to society is defined solely based on your skin color or solely based on your gender. That’s a false promise to young people.
Something else that is also very important, especially in a rising generation where young people are hearing so many narratives of how oppressive America might be, is that they understand that they live in a good, if not great country, a country that is not hostile to their dreams, a place where your dreams are actually possible, but that also recognizes you can’t do it alone.
Agency is individually practiced, but socially empowered. You live in a country where there are institutions like the family, the faith community, and educational opportunities. We are going to fight to make sure that kids have those opportunities, plus the entrepreneurial mindset, all of these things can exist in our country in a way that you can lead the life that you want. Often I think that kids are hearing exactly the opposite of that message. We’re fighting very much to allow young people to know that the path of human flourishing is within their grasp.
Mr. Jekielek: I wish you godspeed with that. Please tell us where people can learn more about the academies and your work.
Mr. Rowe: That’s very kind of you. First of all, the name of our school system is Vertex Partnership Academies. If you go to vertexacademies.org, you’ll find lots of information about our schools in the Bronx. We’re actually looking for corporate partners who want to create new pathways of talent into computer science, engineering, healthcare, real estate industries; entities that want to create apprenticeships with students that are still in high school to discover whole new ways to pursue life opportunities. We’re very excited to have folks join us in this endeavor. There are no victims in our school, only architects of their own lives.
Mr. Jekielek Ian Rowe, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Rowe: I’m inspired. Thank you for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Ian Rowe and me on this episode of “American Thought Leaders.” I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts
-
PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD:
The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD:
https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off.
-
Follow American Thought Leaders on social media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader
Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader
