Ian Rowe Interview: An Approach to Empower all Americans to Pursue Their Dreams

We are back with another powerful episode of the Empower Podcast, featuring a riveting conversation with Ian Rowe, the dynamic author, scholar, and founder of a thriving charter school network. Rowe's inspiring book, 'Agency,' serves as the foundation of our conversation, as we delve into the concept of personal agency and its importance in achieving the American dream. Despite the challenges of overcoming narratives of victimhood, Rowe stands firm in his belief that individuals hold the power to shape their own destinies.

Our dialogue with Rowe takes us into uncharted territories, challenging conventional narratives around race, societal outcomes, and systemic racism. The focus is shifted towards personal agency, underscoring the significance of family, education, entrepreneurship, and the success sequence in breaking the chains of disadvantage. As we navigate these profound topics, we also touch upon the legislative barriers that obstruct progress and the courage required to confront these issues head-on. Get ready for a stimulating conversation that challenges perspectives, encourages self-empowerment and celebrates the power of agency

 

Transcript 

Grant Callen: Welcome to the Empower podcast, the show where we talk about Mississippi's big challenges and big opportunities. Each episode, we'll talk with lawmakers, policy experts, and community leaders about how we can break down barriers together to create A Mississippi where everyone can rise. I'm Grant Callen, founder and CEO of Empower Mississippi, where we put people over divisive politics and work to give voice and hope to those most impacted by public policy decisions.

Listen to today's episode so you can learn how we can work together to make Mississippi the best place in America to live, work, and raise a family.

Welcome back. I am really excited about today's show, which will be different than most of our episodes. So instead of an interview here in the studio, for today's episode, we're going to reair my interview with author, scholar, and charter school founder, Ian Rowe. Which took place recently at Empower's third annual solution centered policy summit that we call Unleash Mississippi.

The conversation centered around Ian Rowe's book titled Agency. The four point plan for all children to overcome the victimhood narrative and discover their pathway to power. Rowe's central theme is that the American dream is still alive today. That idea that with hard work and wise life choices, kids in America today can still succeed and live fulfilling lives of purpose.

But, he argues, that if we constantly bombard the next generation with messages that say, institutional barriers are too high and racial injustice is everywhere and insurmountable, we actually discourage kids from ever trying. His message isn't that racism doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't work hard to remove barriers to opportunity.

Absolutely, we should. And that's really core to the mission of our organization, Empower Mississippi. But, his message is that we should teach kids that they still have agency over their choices. And that though barriers exist, these barriers can be overcome and the American Dream is still possible. This conversation was really powerful.

And I think it's highly relevant for Mississippi today. I think you're going to love it. So without further ado, let's roll the interview.

Intro: And now, please welcome Charter School founder, author, and education advocate Ian Rowe to the stage.

Ian Rowe: Hello. Hello. .

Grant Callen: What a great setup for our last and final conversation. That was a picture of kids in charter schools all around Mississippi. So it's my pleasure to introduce my friend Ian Rowe. He is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on education. and Upward Mobility, Family Formation, and Adoption.

He is the co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, which is a new network of charter high schools in the Bronx. He spent 10 years as CEO of another charter school network. He spent time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He even did a stint at MTV.

Ian Rowe: I did.

Grant Callen: I bet you couldn't have, that was not on your bingo card.

he's a Teach for America alum. I know we have some other Teach for America folks here and he's a first generation American. His, his parents immigrated from Jamaica. Yes. And he's an author. His recent book, Agency, is fantastic. And I'm delighted to have you here. And I thought, what a great way to start it.

What is Agency? And why did you write the book?

Ian Rowe: Wow. Well, thank you, Grant. And thank you for this opportunity to be here. I've been listening to some of the conversations and it is impressive. You know, it's a, it's sometimes tough for a state that, you know, may often be maligned and then, you know, really put your nose to the grindstone and say we can make change and have a deliberate effort, and then celebrate when it happens at, while still recognizing that there is work to be done.

So I think that's pretty powerful and, you know, worthy of a, sort of a self gradulatory congratulatory moment. . And so, in some ways, when you ask what is Agency in a sense what I just described, , this sort of process of Self renewal, self betterment, ,strengthening who you are. That's, in some ways, what we're trying to cultivate within our own students, and my own children, frankly.

The sense of agency, the sense that you can lead a self determined life of purpose and meaning, a life of personal responsibility. You know, I run schools in the, in the Bronx, , and I've run schools for close to 15 years now in the Bronx, lower east side of Manhattan, primarily low income kids, black and Hispanic kids who face many of the same challenges that children here face in Mississippi.

And the things that I've realized, the reason I I run schools as I want our students to know that they can do hard things, that they will face inevitable challenges, but they have the capacity within to overcome those challenges that they don't have to adopt a victimhood narrative. And part of the reason I wrote the book is that over the last few years, especially since, particularly , the, the deaths of Michael Brown, George Floyd, there've been these emerging narratives.

That in a sense have robbed young people of a sense of agency that have robbed their ability to see a sense of possibility within their own lives. And I describe these what I call meta narratives as, blame the system and blame the victim. In a blame the system narrative or ideology, that's a view of the United States that if you're not successful in this country, it's because America itself is inherently an oppressive nation that the systems themselves are imbued with racism.

Or, if you're of a certain skin color, if you're a certain gender, if you're a certain economic class. The systems are rigged against you. You know, capitalism is evil. There's a white supremacist lurking on every corner and that these systems are so powerful, so dominant, so rigged that you as an individual are powerless to overcome them.

And the only ways to survive is if there's some massive government intervention that will somehow, save the day. And obviously in that kind of blame the system narrative. That obviously robs you a sense of your own sense of self determination, right? But on the other side, I've observed, particularly over the last few years, also this kind of blame the victim narrative that if you're not successful in this country, it's not because America is the problem.

I mean, America is great. America is the land of opportunity. The streets are paved with gold. So if you're not successful... It's your fault, right? You somehow are the architect of your own failure. You didn't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And so between these two narratives, , blame the victim, blame the system, it's pretty hard for you to craft a sense of your own future.

I mean, we just opened up Vertex Partnership Academies, a high school in the Bronx. Only 7 percent of kids that start 9th grade four years later, graduate from high school ready for college. Right? Meaning that you start ninth grade and you either drop out or you actually do earn your high school diploma four years from then, but you still can't do math nor reading without remediation.

But in this district, there's a cap on charter schools. So all those great schools you just saw in that video. You would be, prohibited if you had a great idea to launch a school to serve these kids, you couldn't do that, right? So that's an example of a true systemic barrier. So even in a blame the victim ideology, a 7 year old or a 12 year old can't solve that problem.

But so the idea is that we have to find an empowering alternative between blame the system and blame the victim and that's really why I wrote the book Agency because I wanted to create a new way of looking at the problem not being so obsessed with failure because we often spend so much time on the parts of our system where kids are failing In almost every system almost any neighborhood where you see lots of failure.

There is almost always Success always. And yet somehow we just ignore what are the ingredients that it's enabling and empowering people to thrive even in the very conditions that so many seem to be failing. And that's what agency is all about. It really tries to dig into what are the ingredients that make it so, particularly for young people, that if they choose this pathway, they're much more likely to succeed.

Grant Callen: So you use a phrase in the book. That you have a whole chapter on this where you speak to saying, we're not saying racism and barriers don't exist, but you use the phrase surmountable racism, right? What do you mean by that? Right?

Ian Rowe: Well, if you normally listen to these kinds of debates on, why there is, why there's lack of mobility in certain communities and why it's existed for so long.

And particularly around the issue of race. There's usually what I call, monocausality, that if, for example, in education, there's been a racial achievement gap for as long as there's been a national assessment for educational progress, the nation's report card. And it's true. If you look at the reading levels at fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade for white students, let's say it's here.

And for black students, it's here, right? And so that gap has been relatively, static for 30, 40 years. And so some people look at that and say, mic drop, that's the proof of systemic discrimination, systemic biases, systemic racism. Well, it turns out that if you look at that same data, there has never been a year in which a majority of white students are even reading at grade level, right?

So even if we were to close what is often the goal to close the racial achievement gap, All you would be achieving is universal mediocrity. Right? Perhaps there are factors outside of race that are really driving some of these outcomes. But, when you're often in these conversations... The idea is that, no, no, no, this is structural racism.

This is institutional racism. This is systemic racism. And my thing is look at, well, okay, if you're going to insist on those, then you also have to insist on this idea of surmountable racism, that it, there's never been a human society in which people don't find some reason to discriminate against another group of people, whether it's on race, religion.

You know, it's unfortunately part of the human condition. The question is, what do we do? What do we empower young people to know that they have within their quiver to be successful against the range of adversity? that they're going to face. And so that's, yeah, so I think it's important to acknowledge we live in the real world where there are forces that, can impede the progress of whole groups of people.

Again, in the same district in New York and the Bronx, where the college, the college readiness is about seven percent. Again, there's a legislative barrier impeding the ability for people to open up schools. Most of the elected officials who were voting to keep that prohibition in place are black.

So is that an example of systemic racism when most of the elected officials who were impeding the ability for primarily black and low income Hispanic kids to get an opportunity? That's who's holding it back. So race obviously takes up a certain place, but it almost like sucks the energy out of almost any other forces that we need to have the courage, and honesty to face.

And again, that's why I've written agency to show that there is. There's a different kind of framework that we can think about that doesn't ignore these factors but maybe can empower young people to think differently about their lives.

Grant Callen: So you mentioned this framework. This is F R E E. What does it stand for? What does it mean?

Ian Rowe: Well, family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship. Free. When I started writing this book, I actually had no concept of this framework. I was thinking about upward mobility, but the things I really started to challenge myself to think about, you talk a little bit about my career and I've had some amazing experiences from the white house, MTV, Bill and Melinda Gates teach for America now running schools for the last 15 years.

And in that time, I have worked with so many different kinds of kids, black kids, white kids, Asian kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids, rich kids, kids in homeless shelters, kids who's faced unbelievable abuse and neglect. And so I've been in this work long enough now. That I've seen kids who, you know, as they start to make their decisions, as they enter young adulthood where they basically are recreating the same disadvantages that they may have experienced growing up.

Right. So they've perpetuated. the cycle of deprivation in their own lives. But I've also seen kids who were raised in the kinds of conditions that most people looking from the outside would say, Oh my God, that kid is doomed for failure. The single parent home, low income dad incarcerated.

And yet somehow as they make their decisions into young adulthood, They break the cycle, right? They're on a different pathway. And so the question, the animating question in my life has become, what makes the difference? Is it just random? Is it that, gee, you know, these, the ones who were able to break the cycle of disadvantage were just, they were born seven foot tall with a basketball in their hand and they could just make it?

And my observation is that it's not random. That the young people who were able to break the cycle of disadvantage as they entered young adulthood, in my view, in my experience, usually had a sense of personal agency, of personal responsibility, that they had, um, the sense they could lead a self determined life, but it didn't come from nowhere.

Right? I say agency is individually practiced, but socially empowered. And the social empowerment in my observation came from four institutions: Family, Religion, Education and Entrepreneurship.

I'll go through one very quickly, and family, and because it's the anchor, the acronym is F R E E, not IRF, right? Like, F is first. Cause the young people that were able to break the cycle of disadvantage, the thing that they seem to recognize was that the most fundamental human decision, the decision a human being can make is to bring another human being into the world, right? And so, and that there are different strategies. And so they recognized, regardless of the family that they were from, the key was about the family that they were on the pathway to form. That's why in our schools at Vertex Partnership Academies, we actually have a class called Pathways to Power.

And in that class, we teach the data associated with something called a success sequence, which some of you might be familiar with. Even if you're not familiar with the term, probably many of you have followed it in your life. But it's data that says if a young person finishes just their high school degree, then gets a full time job of any kind, just so they learn the dignity and discipline of work, and then if they have children, marriage first, is that order?

Education, work, marriage, then children? Data says 97 percent of millennials who follow that path of decision making avoid poverty, and the vast majority enter the middle class or beyond. We think that's really important, information for young people to know, especially, again, in the district in which I run in the Bronx, the non marital birth rate is 84%.

And that number, you go to Chicago, L. A., Appalachia, you know, there are non marital birth rates of that order of magnitude. So if young people are not seeing examples of what it means to form a family, we as a school have to take the step to, teach that. And what's interesting, we teach it not in what I call a prescriptive fashion, meaning you must do this.

We teach it in a descriptive fashion, meaning that... You're going to be making a lot of decisions over the course of the next 10 years of your life around relationships, education. But you should know there's one set of pathways that typically leads to 97 percent avoidance of poverty and entry into the middle class or beyond.

There are other pathways that lead to different sets of outcomes, but you ultimately have to decide. So, that's among the ways we talk about how we help young people. understand the pathways for that first F in free family. Our religion, again, over my course of time, seeing young people who broke the cycle of disadvantage, usually they lived by a moral code, typically informed by some kind of organized religion.

Didn't matter. It almost doesn't matter what religion, but they, they, they, there was a set of precepts that they said there was a sense of what's right. And what's wrong? And importantly, they were part of a community of people, whether it be going to church on Sunday, but they were part of a community of people that held them accountable to living up to that moral code.

And even as we see, religiosity going down in our country, high levels of loneliness, isolation, alienation, the numbers are dramatically different for young people who have a personal faith commitment. And that's what I observed. So that's the R in free. E, not surprisingly stands for educational freedom, school choice.

Many of the things we've talked about here that young people who were able to break the cycle of disadvantage typically benefited from the ability to go to a school that their caregivers thought was right for them. And unfortunately too many kids across the country don't. have access to that. But if you're on this pathway where you're on the pathway to form a strong family, you have a personal faith commitment, you've benefited from educational freedom that usually adds up to the last E entrepreneurship where you have what I call an entrepreneurial mindset.

You're a problem solver in your own life. Like, so when. The inevitable challenges come, you have the ability to craft a plan to overcome. And so that's my framework. Free Family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship is my empowering alternative to the blame the system and blame the victim narratives.

And what I try to do in the book, at least, is to show the pathways for which we can help young people embrace each of these pillars within their own lives.

Grant Callen: So in a lot of ways. I mean, these are such common sense ideas, and yet I follow you on Twitter, so I see the kind of abuse and the attacks you get that people think some of this stuff is really radical.

And what's astonishing to me is how many people of all political stripes who are successful in America follow the success sequence. They follow the free framework. Oh, drives me crazy. And you say it in the book. You say, we've got to get back to preaching what we practice. . And 50 or even, 100 years or 50 years ago.

We people did that and now we're afraid to say there's a lot of data to support this path why are we so afraid to say this?

Ian Rowe: Well, I named my book agency but in many ways the most important word to walk away from is one of the cardinal virtues that we teach at our school It's courage.

It's having the courage just to say obvious things. There's a great book that's just, or is about to come out called the, The Two Parent Privilege, by Melissa Kearney, who's an economist. And in this book, she writes about just the overwhelming data that shows that children raised in married two parent households massively different and more positive outcomes relative to any other family formation. But throughout the book, she apologizes almost so many times for saying, I'm not saying we're not demonizing single mothers, which by the way, we're not, right? But this kind of, highlighting the ideal or highlighting what is almost obviously better for kids somehow now is construed as an attack on any other family structure, I think, is what makes people start to say, wait a minute, if I go out there and say this, I'm going to be called racist, I'm going to be doing blaming the victim, right? So the blame the victim narrative. And so if you talk about these kinds of things, because I'm accused of being a blamer of the victims often by simply naming some of the cultural issues that face many of the communities that seem to be entrenched in these sort of cycle of deprivation.

And the thing that if you are if you're genuinely concerned with the upward mobility of kids in Mississippi or anywhere else across the country, the one word I want you to walk away from this is have the courage to say what you know to be true, especially if you've done it in your own life. When we first started teaching the success sequence in schools in New York city, I had huge pushback.

You can't do that. You can't teach these things. You're imposing middle class values onto these kids. I'm like, well, yeah, I am trying to impose middle class. I'm, yes, I mean, yes, we have eons and eons of human humanity that have, but no, no, no, no, because, you know, you'll be embarrassing these kids.

You'll be shaming these kids. And I remember when we were designing vertex partnership academies, our high school in the Bronx, this is right before COVID. I was visiting, high performing high schools across the country. So I was in new Orleans and I visited a KIPP high school and, and so it was a ninth grade class, predominantly, black and Hispanic and Asian students, all low income.

And the teacher, gave me permission to talk to the class and I decided to use it as kind of a mini focus group. And I said to this class, If you knew that there were a series of decisions in your control that when young people just like you followed that series of decisions, 97 percent of the time, those young people avoided poverty later in life and entered the middle class and had a lot more economic freedom.

Would you want to know what those series of decisions are? And these very reasonable, logical ninth graders said, well, yeah, of course I'd went, why wouldn't I want to know? And then I said, well, there's some grownups that don't want you to know. That's by the way, that's from my experience at MTV.

The one thing you want to get young people, dangle it and then take it away. So I said, there's some grownups that don't want you to know, you can't handle it. You might get insulted. You might be offended, so better just not to tell you, right? And so they looked at me like I was crazy.

What are you talking about? What are you talking about? You tell us. You let us decide after we know the information whether or not we think it's useful or not. Very interesting, right? Because there's always gatekeepers who somehow. What's good for them evidently is not good for the, these people who they're trying to help, but they can't follow my way of life, right?

Those are the gatekeepers that you have to have the courage to stand up to. So we then proceeded to have a conversation where I talked to these young people about this thing called the success sequence. Not a guarantee, 97%, you know, but there are other pathways. And, what was interesting about the conversation at the end of it, it's not as if at the end, these ninth graders like, Oh, my life is solved.

But what I definitely felt, was that they felt that they had been respected as future decision makers within their own life, right? That's what we're trying to do with solid, healthy education. Ensure young people have the information to make the best decisions for themselves. So while there are all these other people attacking, you can't teach this, you can't do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the people themselves, the very people who are in the situation that we're all trying to help are yearning.

For the tools that would allow them to overcome the barriers that everyone else is telling them are insurmountable. That's why I talk about surmountable racism. What are the tools that we need to give and empower young people with so they can overcome this victimhood narrative?

Grant Callen: And the racism that actually exists.

Ian Rowe: No, of course, again, but there is no society, You know, I just read some data. I mean, okay, so here's another example. So the racial wealth gap is often used as proof of historical and present day racial discrimination in this country. And if you look at the 2019 survey of consumer finances, it is true that the median wealth of the average white family is about 180, 000 more than the median wealth, oh no, it's not. It's about $160,000 more than the median wealth of the average black family. Again, mic drop, end of conversation. That systemic racism done right. Okay, well, but if you look at that same 2019 survey of consumer finances, if you take into account just two factors, family structure and education, it turns out that the median wealth of the average married college educated black family is about 160, 000 more than the median wealth of the average white single parent family.

So, why is that important to know, for young people in particular, in that, well, maybe there are factors beyond race that are far more determinative in what your life can be. Doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist, or any host of other challenges, but clearly there are people that are being successful who have recognized that there are other tools within their quiver.

And so it's just trying to widen the aperture, right? To let young people know that they don't have to live in this narrow sort of sleeve of life where everyone is, everyone else is telling you what you have the capacity to do or not. Based on the singular characteristic.

Grant Callen: Yeah. I love where you say in the book. We're trying to give our kids tools to overcome or tools to act on things they can control and not just suffer by things they can't control.

Ian Rowe: Correct. Right. I mean, that's why the blame the system narrative is so debilitating, right? Because , who's it? Nicole Hannah Jones, the author of the 1619 Project.

She literally says in this. This essay where she's arguing for, like a 13, 14 trillion dollar government reparations program which is, just, give money to black people. She says, it doesn't matter what a black person does. Doesn't matter if you save, doesn't matter if you buy a home, doesn't matter if you get educated in college, doesn't matter if you get married.

In her words, none of those things can overcome 400 years of racialized plundering. It's really, God, I mean, okay, then what do I do? How do I make it in this world? And so, if young people over and over and over and over and over are being told how systemically biased this entire society is against them.

After a while, you start to believe it and you start to not believe in any of the institutions that actually could empower you to rise above whatever, discrimination. And by the way, this isn't only for black kids, the non marital birth rate, in the black community in the mid 1960s, which is when, Pat Moynihan wrote his famous, report about, because at the time, he saw that there was a segment of the black community that was not doing well, and he decided to write this report about it.

And he did this analysis, and he came to the conclusion that the non marital birth rate in the black community was a real issue. It was 23. 6 percent when he wrote that report in 1964. Crisis, crisis, crisis, right? Well, the non marital birth rate in the black community today is 70%, but it's 30 percent in the white community at a higher rate than the crisis levels were, for black, in the black community in the 60s.

So it's what I call the equal opportunity tsunami. So, these issues, I mean, part, and one of the things I think we have to get better at is, de racializing some of these issues. So, you don't only think, well, this is just an issue of these poor black kids. You know, look, there, there's a reason deaths of despair, a lot of the research you've read recently about the white working class, a lot of that has to do with the same issues of breakdown of family structure, explosion of non marital birth rates, lower religiosity, lack of access to high quality education.

These are factors that affect humanity. And so again, that's something I try to do in the book, which is to de race, because sometimes race is so heavy, it impedes our ability to recognize that these are issues, as well as these are levers, that could unleash Mississippi or unleash people of all backgrounds to really fulfill their potential.

Grant Callen: So how does this play itself out practically in your schools? I mean, you talk in the book about ESAs, you talk about other forms of school choice, but you've spent now 15 years running, opening and running charter schools. Yeah. How does this philosophy and this, the topics you talk about in the book, how does it play itself out in the students that you're leading?

Ian Rowe: Well, it's, it's a good question because, I'm a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, which is an amazing, amazing organization, some of the most brilliant people I've ever met, doing research and forming policy, which is extremely important. And, there's nothing like actually running schools in neighborhoods with real people, because you just get a whole different perspective on how to actually make these things happen.

So I mentioned, in District 12, uh, in the Bronx, where we just opened up for Text Partnership Academies, our high school. We were sued by the teachers union, and when we put this idea forth, again, in a district where only 7 percent of kids are graduating from high school ready for college.

And the union literally sued to block us before we opened. Thankfully, a New York State Supreme Court judge threw out the case six days before school was going to open in August of 2022. You just don't learn that. By crafting policy papers and doing research. And so this idea of, theory and practice is very important to me to really get at the heart of your question of , how do you really bring this to life?

And so in our school, there's several things that we. One of which is teaching the success sequence, like teaching real data about the pathway of decisions that young people are going to be making within the next 10 years of their lives. We also have a great focus around, how to cultivate agency and personal responsibility.

So the entire school. is organized around the four cardinal virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And they're the cardinal virtues, like cardinal is cardo, the Latin root for hinge, right? Because all other, standards of moral excellence are built off of before cardinal virtues. And so we have our students internalize through these I statements of what courage, what each one of them means.

So courage stands for I reject victimhood and boldly persevere even in times of struggle and uncertainty. Those are words that all of our kids internalize and memorize, temperance. I lead my life with self discipline because I am responsible for my learning and behavior. Our students learn those words, right?

And so it's really important that, sometimes it's repetition and memorization and over time they start to realize, wait a minute, I lead my life with self discipline and I'm responsible for my learning and behavior. It's really important that young people know that they're responsible.

Ultimately, there are lots of systems, there's lots of environmental factors for sure. But at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own life. I reject victimhood and boldly persevere even in times of struggle and uncertainty. It's really important to be able to like grab that in moments when you might be feeling like, wow, maybe I don't have any choice here.

I just have to do this. But no, I lead my life with self discipline. Right? Because I'm responsible for my learning and behavior. So that's something else that's very, very important. We also do a lot of oral recitation of poetry is a great poem that all of our kids know. I mean, I was actually yesterday I was taping, one of our classes learning Invictus, which is a poem some of you might know by William Ernest Henley.

And the last two lines of Invictus are, I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Beautiful, amazing words. And when you see a group of young people, by the way, all in their uniforms and blazers. It's inspiring, right? And it becomes infectious because they're taking control of their lives.

Or we at least are trying to help them learn how to take control of their lives. Another thing that we do is we recognize, so this is at the high school level. We recognize that college, so when I started running elementary and middle schools, I was the prior network I ran for a decade. You know, I was all about college, college, college, college, college, college, college, right?

That's college, college, college. I mean, that's, that's it, right? Well, it turns out college doesn't always, it's not. Always the right answer for every kid, right? So at the end of sophomore year, every young person will have the choice to choose a pathway which is a more traditional, university or college pathway.

So during their junior and senior year, they're really being prepped to attend some of the finest colleges, universities. Or they can choose what we call the careers pathway. And in the careers pathway, you can still at the end of your junior and senior year, you could still go to college if that's who you want.

However, we're embedding within that two years the opportunity to do apprenticeships. So imagine you could work at Google, maybe one day a week, studying coding and being able to get a credential for it or at a New York city hospital. Where you could learn to become a phlebotomist and learning how to take blood.

And so at the end of four years of high school, you could actually have an industry credential with labor market value. So if you wanted to get a job right out of high school, that could be something that you do. And it doesn't mean that that means. You never go to college. It might just mean you go to college two or three years after you've been able to pocket some money.

You've had a couple more years of maturity. And there's a ton of data. MDRC did a great study a couple of years ago. We show that particularly for low income boys, their outcomes when they had work immediately out of high school. So, far lower numbers of, non marital births, far less engagement with the criminal justice system, higher rates of, college going and college completion if they did go a few years out.

So these are some of the things that we're doing to make these ideas real for how you actually cultivate a sense of agency, within our students.

Grant Callen: We love charter schools here. I told you a minute ago. We only have eight charters actually this as of this fall we have ten that are now open statewide.

Ian Rowe: 25 percent increase .

Grant Callen: That's right.

We're getting there. We need a lot more But it's interesting when you think about this topic of agency and how important it is in the lives and it's such a It is such an American idea, and yet we designed a, an education system that assigns kids to schools based on their neighborhood that doesn't give them the ability to exercise agency about the school they go to.

So, I guess my question would be, we have some lawmakers here, why is this so important and why have you decided You care about this agency thing, and you've decided to put it into practice in schools. What would you say to lawmakers about what we ought to do to spread it here?

Ian Rowe: I guess what I'd say is Imagine a conversation with a 22 year old mom who has made some tough decisions in her life.

And she has a 4 year old daughter, and so... She's trying to figure out her life, the mom, but she wants to ensure that her daughter has the kinds of opportunities she just didn't have access to. Right. And let's say she's in the Bronx or maybe Missy, but the school that she's zoned for has had single digit proficiency rates for as long as she has lived there.

And she's lived there 22 years of her life and there's a Catholic school or another, public school or a charter school, maybe half a mile away, right? And she sees that school and maybe she sees the Catholic school and it's like 2, 500 or 5, 000. And then she can't afford it, but there's a voucher.

You know, where there's an ESA, where there's a tool that would allow her to go from this school, which has single digit proficiency rates, and there's that school less, less than half a mile away. Like that's the conversation I want a legislator to think about. Don't listen to all the, the muckety mucks, the gatekeepers, the ones who send their own kids to private schools, or the ones who move to the suburbs to go to great schools for free.

So, just put yourself in that conversation with that 22 year old mom who wants the best for her kid to ensure her kid has a shot that she may not have had. You have to humanize these things in a way to cut through all the rhetoric and nonsense that the gatekeepers are doing to preserve the status quo that only hurts kids.

Grant Callen: So, I want to close with this question to you. Um, I think your work and your book is so incredibly timely and relevant to this moment in our country. But it really is timeless and the ideas are timeless. When you think about the book and maybe your broader life work, what do you hope the legacy of all this is 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now?

Ian Rowe: I mean, that's a good question. Well, de Tocqueville, when he was, the Frenchman who was, observing America 200 plus years ago, observing the practices of this strange new country, he saw all these things that people organized, they created associations locally, they, they didn't wait for, problem.

They didn't wait for someone else to just come. They came together and they solved problems locally, um, they tapped into each other as this, since this kinship, this Americanism, right, that we are, and he has this phrase, "what makes America's special is not that it's more enlightened than any other nation. It's that it has the ability to repair her faults." And I've always thought that was a beautiful symbolic image, because in the same way he views the country, I want every kid to see themselves that way. That within them, they have the tools of self renewal, self betterment, that they have the tools to repair their own faults, that we can become better.

And I want to live in a society where most young people have that sense of agency. You're going to run into challenges. Because you are. But you have the ability to repair your own internal faults or whatever external forces may be coming your way. And my hope is that this fight actually brings us together as a country across race.

We've now gotten to the point where, as I said before, many of these issues are human issues. Issues of family structure, issues of loss of religiosity, issues of lack of access to high quality education. It affects everyone. And so I would hope that our fight is now across a human dimension. And that's the legacy I would love to leave.

It's good. Well, we're going to continue this conversation over a reception in a couple of minutes. Please help me thank Ian Rowe.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of the Empower podcast. To learn more about how you can get involved, and we can work together to make Mississippi a place where everyone can rise, go to our website at empowerms. org. Please like or subscribe on your favorite podcast app. So you'll be notified future episodes.