New Bronx High School Focused on Excellence, Responsibility

Teaching children to escape the victimhood trap and find their pathways to power

Ian Rowe, co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies. (Otabius Williams/The Epoch Times)

“The message to the kids in our school is that they are the architects of their own lives,” says Ian Rowe, co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies.

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek visited Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-focused, International Baccalaureate high schools located in the Bronx. He spoke with one of Vertex’s founders, Ian Rowe, about the aims of the academies, the programs, and the vision going forward. Previously, Rowe was CEO of the Public Prep charter school network for 10 years.

Ian Rowe: We’re in District 12 in the Bronx, a district where only 7 percent graduate from high school ready for college. And so we thought it was very important to create a new educational institution focused on excellence for families who are desperate for their kids to have a shot at the American dream.

We’ve opened Vertex Partnership Academies in a beautiful old Catholic school, the 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 very building, which is now our home for Vertex Partnership Academies.

Jan Jekielek: Do you think that one school can nudge that 7 percent number?

Mr. Rowe: My hope is that we can build an entire network of great new high schools. We know that 100 percent 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 academies, only architects of their own lives. We want our students to develop resiliency, good communication skills, and community-mindedness. Our school is about academics, math, science, language, and literature but also the virtues and character-based strengths that we want our kids to develop.

Mr. Jekielek: You’ve said, “Agency is an empowering alternative to the narrative of equity.”

Mr. Rowe: We’re living in a time where dominant narratives, particularly for young people, are pushing this idea that you’re simply a victim. These forces are so overwhelming, so powerful, and so discriminatory that you, as an individual, are immobilized because of your race and gender. I believe that agency can be a much more empowering alternative. It’s a tool you have to walk a path of prosperity.

If we can cultivate a new age of agency in our country, we'll have a much more optimistic, future-oriented generation. 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 who aren’t good people. So how do you learn how to become a morally discerning person?

That’s why I’ve created F.R.E.E., which is focused on the key institutions that help young people develop agency: family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship. If our society were to invest in those four pillars, we would see young people move away from this ideology of victimhood, dependency, and grievance to hope, empowerment, and agency. This all ties back to the idea of agency.

Mr. Jekielek: As you’re saying this, I keep coming back to the structural barriers we’re told about, narratives that simply aren’t true. They’re almost like a distraction from the difficult barriers that actually do exist.

Mr. Rowe: Yes. Let’s take Nikole Hannah-Jones. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a reporter and the lead writer for The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project.” She says a black person basically is powerless to close the racial wealth gap. It doesn’t matter if you get married, buy a home, or get educated. None of those things can help “close or address 400 years of racialized plundering.”

Mind you, Nikole Hannah-Jones has done all of those things to lead a life of flourishing. She has recognized that whatever barriers there are, there certainly seems to be a pathway that creates a much greater likelihood of success.

There are tens of millions of other people flourishing in their lives despite these challenges. Why? What is it we can learn from people who succeed? That’s the central question that I often find the opponents of some of my ideas unwilling to explore.

There’s something called the success sequence, which some of your viewers might be familiar with. They may not know the term, but they certainly know the series of behaviors, because they may have practiced it in their own lives. 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 show that 97 percent of millennials who follow that series of decisions avoid poverty. 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 evidence that shows people with the same conditions as you have made these kinds of decisions and flourished.”

Mr. Jekielek: Essentially, we’ve been talking about Pathways to Power. What is this course?

Mr. Rowe: We teach Pathways to Power 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’re equipped with the best information.

Right now, they’re finishing up an assignment related to “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.” They’re learning about goal setting, overcoming challenges, and the strategies they can deploy to be effective in their own lives.

Again, the message to the kids in our school is that they’re the architects of their own lives. At the end of sophomore year at Vertex Partnership Academies, 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 still taking academic classes, you 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, such as phlebotomy and how to take blood. You’ll be at a New York City-based hospital maybe one day per week, interning. At the end of your senior year, you’ll be credentialed as a phlebotomist or in another discipline within the health care arena.

We want students to know that they’re not just cogs in some larger system. They have agency, but there’s also mutual responsibility. As a school, we’re going to create some amazing opportunities for you. But you as an individual have to step up, you have to rise.

And there’s enthusiasm among parents for this. They’re the ones desperate for options and clamoring for these opportunities.

Mr. Jekielek: And yet the incentive structure at large is completely upside down. This is what’s dawning on me as you’re speaking here.

Mr. Rowe: Yes. Shelby Steele, in an interview I did with him, said, “In the black community, our biggest problem isn’t racism. Our biggest problem is freedom.”

It was profound. He was saying the responsibility of freedom, of being in control of your own destiny, is actually scarier than being trapped in a narrative of victimhood, where you’re never asked to be responsible for your own actions. It’s always about somebody else who’s doing something to you.

What has slowly occurred in our country, certainly over the past 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’re white, for example, and as a result, you’re inherently an oppressor, privileged regardless of all the other things that may be going on in your life. And that’s very dangerous for our country.

With the kids in our schools, we teach individuals to feel, to succeed, to fail, to get back up, and to be resilient. We’re fighting hard to allow young people to know that the path of human flourishing is within their grasp.

Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us where people can learn more about the academies and your work.

Mr. Rowe: 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 in fields such as health care, real estate, and engineering to help create new pathways of talent for our students to be not victims but architects of their own lives.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.