Wisdom & Influence Podcast Ep. 8: Faith In Action with Ian Rowe

President Moreno-Riaño

Ian, so great to have you at Cornerstone. You’ve become a regular. It’s your second time now. Thank you. First Wisdom Conversations in 2022. And now part of the President’s Fellows program. Thank you so much for being a part of what we’re doing.

Ian Rowe

I am so excited to be here and hopefully it is the first of many visits to Cornerstone.

President Moreno-Riaño

Thank you, Ian. You know, this morning you met with our President’s Fellow students – 25 to 30 students – and it was just a wonderful opportunity to see students ask profound questions about their calling and what they’re thinking. But one of the things that you shared with the students this morning is how to really leverage your Christian influence and faith in action. And at the core of Cornerstone, we have this beautiful mission about educating influencers in the world for Jesus Christ. It’s the mission. And we work really hard to bring that into action, to operationalize it, was the word. Can you share with us a little bit about that in your life, in your thinking, in your work?

Ian Rowe

Christian influence is a powerful tool, but it means nothing if it’s just kind of off to the side and never really utilized. So it’s one thing to proselytize, but it’s a whole different thing to actualize. In my own work, I’ve been called to work with children, particularly children in vulnerable communities in places like the Bronx in New York, who were in school districts where only 7 % of kids graduate from high school ready for college.

And I could write about those issues and hopefully get many people to be concerned. But I also can open a school to demonstrate that you can build a great school in this community that shows that you can create an environment where 100 % of the kids are not only capable of graduating from college, but excelling — going to some of the best schools and universities in the country.

I think that’s one of the powers of our Christian faith is to build institutions at a time where it seems that so many of the institutions that really drive human flourishing are crumbling, whether it be the family, our religious institutions, or schools. It’s time to build. It’s time to build. And what I try to encourage the students, the (President’s) Fellows, to think about today is how to take their faith and match that to their analytical ability. Put those together and then create new institutions that are serving the vulnerable or those that are not yet excelling at the highest level.

President Moreno-Riaño

You mentioned something in chapel as well. Beautiful, wonderful message by the way. Thank you so much for speaking at our chapel. And focusing on your model of “FREE”: Freedom, Religion, Education, and Entrepreneurship. What you mentioned at the very end — entrepreneurship — really caught my attention because for scholars to define entrepreneurship has always been a challenge. What is it? You spoke about it almost as a virtue. Talk with us a little bit about that entrepreneurship piece. Sometimes entrepreneurs get a bad rap.

Ian Rowe

Unfortunately, many young people today are being marinated in these narratives that tell them everything that they can’t do in their lives. Maybe because of their race or their gender or their economic class. Here are all the things that you don’t have access to. And it’s created, in some communities, almost this idea of learned helplessness — I can’t control my own destiny. And I push back very hard.

In my view, when we’re trying to help young people think about their lives, we want them to operate with a sense of agency, so that they can lead a self-determined life with meaning and purpose. But it doesn’t come from nowhere. And so this “FREE” framework is that in all of my experience, I’ve seen young people grow up in very challenging situations. But if they’ve had interaction with four key pillars, it really can change everything: Family, Religion, Education, and Entrepreneurship.

When I speak about entrepreneurship, it’s almost the outgrowth of being really engaged in those first three. So family means that you’re on the pathway to forming a strong family. Religion means that you’ve adopted a personal faith commitment in your own life and that you live by a moral code. And education is that you’ve had the benefit of educational freedom. And if you have those three things, then the last E in free is about entrepreneurship.

And when most people think of that term, they think of starting a business. Well, it could certainly mean that, but it also means being a problem solver in your own life. And this idea that everyone is going to face inevitable challenges. When that moment comes, will you have the ability to be resilient? Will you have the ability to strategically plan? Will you have what I call an overcomer’s mindset?

So that’s what I mean by entrepreneurship. Life is hard. We will always face challenges. But the thing that you control the most is your response to external challenges. That’s what you can control. I hope that with a FREE framework, if you understand the importance of family, religion, education, and then entrepreneurship at the end, you will have the ability to overcome adversity.

President Moreno-Riaño

One of the things you mentioned about Vertex Partnership Academy —which is a wonderful school that you have founded and led —there are these virtues around which the students really ground their identity in their education. And it was interesting this morning when you mentioned that courage is the most important one. In today’s society, you don’t hear that. You hear social justice of some kind, right? I want to talk with you about courage because moral courage is so important. It’s the virtue that you need to exercise to practice all the other virtues.

Talk with us a little about that because you’re seeing not just the lack of moral courage in education K-12, but as you know, you’re seeing it in higher education. All that’s happened just in the last two months with anti-Semitism, the congressional hearings and college presidents. And as you mentioned over lunch, how difficult is it really to condemn something as evil as the genocide of Israel — a violation of a code of conduct.

Share with us how that is going with your students and in all the traveling and work that you’re doing.

Ian Rowe

Yes. I’ve been running public charter schools in the heart of the Bronx for nearly 15 years. And something that’s always been important is that you have to ensure that our students get a strong, rigorous academic education. They get exposure to some of the finest works in art, music, poetry, literature, science, and math —a really strong grounding and foundation in academic preparation. But what has become very clear to me, even more so over the last few years, is that our kids are being surrounded by almost an attack on their character. They need to develop more character-based strengths to be able to really thrive in this world.

As an educational institution, we decided that for our high school that we wanted to organize the entire school around what are called the cardinal virtues: courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. The Latin root for cardinal is cardo, which means hinge. So all other character-based strengths, all other moral standards of excellence are based on courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. We felt it was very important that we had this structure for our entire school, our rituals, our canon, our curriculum.

And courage is the first, because courage is the virtue that you must exercise in order to practice all others. We went further than just saying these were our virtues. We’ve actually created what we call “I” statements. These are statements that all of our students memorize. So think for a moment and just close your eyes. Imagine our students, almost all black and Hispanic students, predominantly low-income—standing strong in their blazers, their Vertex blazers, and they say the “I” statement for courage. “I reject victimhood and boldly persevere even in times of uncertainty and struggle”. Or temperance. “I lead my life with self-discipline because I am responsible for my learning and my behavior”.

Initially they’re learning and memorizing the words; it’s in their head, but over time, it starts to really take hold in their heart. And it becomes how they carry themselves, how they operate in the world, how they view themselves. “I reject victimhood.” No, you may be saying, or larger society may be saying, well, based on your skin color, based on this, based on that, you are not.

“You’re not worthy” or “you don’t have access” or somehow simply because of these characteristics you’re an “oppressed class” or “you’re an oppressor”. We reject that. I think that’s the kind of ethos that should be happening in our elementary, middle and high schools and in higher education. There seems to be this kind of victim ideology that people are gravitating towards, maybe in some ways because it absolves them of responsibility. Like if there’s someone else that I can blame for anything that may be going on in my life, then there’s something very perversely comforting about that.

We say to our students, no, it should be the exact opposite. You have the privilege of your own responsibility. You have the opportunity to achieve at the highest levels. And what we try to do is create a framework. Our kids know what it means to lead a self-determined life. Meaning and purpose, courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom are the framework. We think that can help young people think about their lives, about their community, and to know to do the right thing.

President Moreno-Riaño

You mentioned your family, your parents immigrated to the United States in 1968. My parents did so in 1980. And you mentioned something really beautiful. They were not running away. They’re running to America. I can say the same thing about my father and my mother. And as you spoke, I was so grateful that you spoke in chapel about the American dream.

But there’s a lot of conversation today about that “thing”: “Is it even legitimate to have? Is America so broken, dysfunctional? Always has been. Maybe we shouldn’t even think about an American dream.” And yet when I arrived, I’m sure your experience is the same —there’s something beautiful and powerful about the ideal of America. It’s not perfect. It’s not the kingdom of God. We know that. But it is the place where God has brought us. And we’re here, yes?

So share with us about this question of the American dream, the ideals. How do we as Christians —citizens of the world or in the world, but not of the world —how do we work through our salvation in fear and trembling in this wonderful land of opportunity that has to continue to be renewed and rebuilt and refined?

Ian Rowe

We are at a time where we live in what I would consider to be the greatest country in the world, with booming opportunity, and yet there are large segments of our society that feel that the American dream is some distant reality, or belongs to someone else. And as Christians, as faith influencers, we have to step back and analyze why is it that we can look at our society and see that some people are thriving and others are not.

There’s actually an incredible study that was done a few years ago on this exact question, and it’s called, Where is the Land of Opportunity? This analysis, which was done, took into account the records of nearly 40 million children and their parents that were born in 1980 and 1982 to understand where they stood economically, and they looked at those same exact people 30 years later in 2011 and 2012. And the analysis that was done was —depending on where you were born and raised —what was the likelihood that you lived the American dream? But if you were born in the lowest economic quintile, 30 years later, you were in the highest top economic quintile. And what’s fascinating about the study is that they produced a map of the country to show what was the likelihood of you achieving.

And the first thing that you notice about this map is that there’s incredible variability. In certain parts of the country, it’s almost a guarantee that you’re going to end up doing better than where you were born with your parents. And in other parts of the country, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re not going to live the American dream. Why? And from my perspective, this is where I talk about matching our Christian faith with brutal analytical analysis to see why this is.

Why is it that there are certain areas that are considered a land of opportunity and others where it’s just perpetual deprivation. And this study found that the three big factors that really drove the attainment of the American dream were one, in a given neighborhood, the presence of married two-parent households was one of the biggest factors driving upward mobility. Second, the concentration of religious individuals and involvement in civic organizations was number two. And number three was access to high-quality K-12 education.

This analysis showed that if we are really concerned about the American dream and we have a faith commitment and you have the courage to really look at the data, and say —if we know that these are the factors that really matter —strong families through marriage, strong religious participation, engaged in direct action, and strong access to educational freedom or school choice — then that should inform us as Christians as to how we want to deploy our Christian influence.

And that’s what I tried to speak about in my remarks this morning. Because I think so often, there is a disconnect with these so-called gatekeepers who are kind of self-appointed: “we know what’s best for these people who are in challenging conditions”, when in fact, they have no idea what the real drivers of happiness and upward mobility really are. So to all of our Christian faithful, I think it’s very important — carry your faith and then carry data so you really understand the conditions upon which people are living. We can make a very good faith effort to actually address the underlying reasons why many of the conditions exist in the first place that we are trying to eliminate.

President Moreno-Riaño

You’ve spent all of your life, most of it on K-12 education. In just the last couple of years, I’ve seen a number of studies of the continual decline in the confidence the American public has in higher education in universities. I speak to a lot of people every day as president of this university who share those concerns with me. Why should I invest in higher education, whether it’s Christian or not? Everyone’s questioning higher education.

And yet here we are at Cornerstone, completely committed. We know it’s one of the most important institutions human beings have ever created —universities. And we’re one of those universities. And we see the incredible public value we provide to our community. Share with us your thoughts on higher education. You are K-12, but as you think about students going through the Vertex Partnership Academy and charter schools, and you start thinking about going beyond that, what is the value of a university like a Cornerstone, Christian, higher education, firmly rooted in objective truth, a Christian worldview. How important is that and why?

Ian Rowe

I think you’re absolutely right. The perception of the value of a higher education degree, for many good reasons, is being questioned. Whether it be if you go to a university, suddenly you’re being taught that the only thing that matters about you are these superficial characteristics like your race or your class or your gender, or you’re taught to hate capitalism, or in fact almost even hate the country. There are a lot of families that say, wait a minute, this is not what we signed up for.

That said, when you do have an institution of higher education that’s very clear about what it is seeking to accomplish, what the virtues and values are that it stands for, then that could be of enormous value. Cornerstone obviously falls in that latter category. When you come here, you are a Christ-centered student looking to ultimately leverage your Christian influence in the world. And there is a deliberate effort around that.

From my perspective, one of the things I think that matters most is that it is the institution that’s educating your kid. Are they deliberate? Are they intentional about the values? And are they explicit about the values that they’re trying to inculcate into your students? That’s why at Vertex Partnership Academies, we’ve set the cardinal virtues —that’s what we stand for. I think the more that institutions of higher education focus on the core values, their purpose to transmit knowledge, to help young people learn how to think, but not what to think. Your job is not to force your indoctrination, your particular point of view. Let’s have young people get all the information and then decide for themselves.

The one thing I’ll say about higher education —and this has less to do with ideology — is that I now run high schools in the Bronx and one of the things we’ve learned is that we need to create more what we call optionality within the secondary experience.

For example, at Vertex Partnership Academies, at the end of your sophomore year, you can choose either what’s called the International Baccalaureate Diploma Pathway, which means a two-year course of study that really prepares you for pre-college, pre-university to any of the best schools in the world. Or at the end of sophomore year, you can choose the International Baccalaureate Careers Pathway, which also prepares you to go to college, and it allows you to do apprenticeships or internships during your last two years of your junior and senior year.

Imagine, for example, we’ve just partnered with Northwell Hospital, which is one of the leading health providers in New York State. Our students who’ve chosen the biomedical science careers pathway will have the opportunity to do an apprenticeship one day a week at a hospital, maybe in the role of a physician’s assistant or a phlebotomist taking blood. And at the end of two years of their junior and senior year, they can earn a credential. And in a particular industry, that has labor market value. For some students, college immediately out of high school isn’t necessarily the right answer. What we’re offering to our students is multiple pathways. For some kids, maybe right out of high school, college is the right answer, or it might be working for two or three years to collect some capital, become more mature. Then when you decide to go for your higher education degree, you’re much better equipped and you have a more clear sense of purpose as to why you’re there. I think that’s something that we as a country have to grapple with, that higher education can be extremely valuable, but it may be that for some students we may need to create multiple pathways for when the right time is that they pursue that particular degree.

President Moreno-Riaño

Ian, thank you for being at Cornerstone today. Thank you for being a part of the President’s Files program. And, you’ve invested already in our mission. It’s so great to have you.

Thank you.