How Thomas Sowell Thankfully Made Me A Contrarian Educator
A speech in honor of the great economist
HOW THOMAS SOWEL THANKFULLY MADE ME A CONTRARIAN EDUCATOR
A speech in honor of the great economist
On October 20, 2025, the Hoover Institution honored Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell for a lifetime of fearless inquiry and principled scholarship. Friend-of-FBT Ian Rowe was asked to speak on how Thomas Sowell’s ideas influenced the development of his Bronx-based charter school, Vertex Partnership Academies, and how Sowell helped him become a contrarian educator. Below is the speech he gave.
When I was twelve years old, I had never heard of Thomas Sowell. I doubt any of the kids in my neighborhood had. For the vast majority of American students in K-12 education, opportunities to learn about Sowell or read his books were and remain virtually non-existent.
Yet at a dozen years around the sun, unbeknownst to me, I was about to exhibit the type of Sowellian thinking that challenged the false comfort of conventional wisdom and laid the groundwork for me to become a contrarian educator.
It was the late-1970s. My parents, brother and I had emigrated from Jamaica, West Indies, ultimately moving to Laurelton, Queens, at the time a predominantly Jewish, white middle-class community, but was transitioning into a racially mixed neighborhood as more black residents moved in. Unfortunately, my Junior High School had become the epicenter for increasing racial tension and violence.
To solve this problem, the local school board voted to open an annex two miles away in Rosedale, a small, Irish and Italian American community. That decision led almost every white family in my school to transfer their children, leaving my junior high segregated and virtually all-black.
My parents did not automatically have a concern with a school being all black. In Jamaica, an all black country, they had attended excellent schools with all black students, teachers, and leadership.
But they heard from some American parents—you got to pull your kid out—Wherever go the white kids, so goes the quality of the education. Or so the stereotype went.
They figured maybe to give their son a real shot at the American Dream, they needed to transfer me.
But on the Sunday evening before they had to file the transfer documents, my inner Thomas Sowell came out. While it was nice that some of my classmates were white, I didn’t feel their presence was a prerequisite for me to learn. I liked my school and teachers. Why did all black have to mean all bad?
Thankfully, my parents let me stay at my school. I received a public education that made me believe anything was possible. I took the exam to get into Brooklyn Tech, one of three specialized high schools in New York City. After that, I went on to earn my degree in Computer Science Engineering from Cornell University, and after that my MBA from Harvard Business School.
I share this story about my own coming-of-agency moment and ensuing education because it epitomizes the idea that growing up I did not believe the racial makeup of a school should determine if it’s good or not, or that my race should give me an inherent advantage or disadvantage to get into a good school; or that my race should shield me from the consequence of my actions. It wasn’t until I encountered Thomas Sowell for the first time that I realized there was a conflict of visions on these topics. That happened when I attended Cornell in the early 1980s, not because I was assigned a reading or a lesson from Sowell, but because of this:
During the black student protests of the 1980s, I discovered this actual New York Times headline from 1969 announcing that Thomas Sowell had been a professor at Cornell and resigned over a dispute that he wanted to expel a black student for disorderly behavior but the school refused to do so even though the behavior had clearly violated Cornell’s standards. Professor Sowell warned that “paternalism” and leniency towards blacks was counterproductive and would result in the graduation of “inadequate” black students.
When Cornell said they were going to keep the student enrolled, Sowell said I am out. This was 1969—a young Negro professor (as the headline shows) at an Ivy league institution had the audacity to say I am not going to conform to low expectations around race. So he quit. Honestly, it blew my mind. The more I read and listened to Sowell, so many of the things he said resonated with my beliefs and experience.
Remember that song by Roberta Flack—“Killing me softly”: “Singin’ my whole life with his words.” But instead of killing me softly, Sowell’s words were empowering me to reject these false notions around race.
Take for example, when I went to Brooklyn Tech, there was a very racially and socio-economically diverse student body. All the students and teachers knew every single kid earned the right to be there because we all passed the same rigorous entrance exam. There was no impostor syndrome. Today, for a myriad of reasons the representation of black and Hispanic students is far lower, and unfortunately there are those who now want to get rid of the exam because it is now deemed racist. Sowell strongly opposed this reductionist thinking because he, like me, believes removing objective standards robs kids of the dignity to prove that they can compete on equal footing.
And on the notion that almost led my parents to transfer me years earlier, that all black schools must be bad, Sowell wrote about his own education: “The shock of being in a school whose standards were higher than I was able to meet, at first took place in an all-black school in Harlem.”
These ideas that all-black education was inherently inferior or that black educational excellence had never occurred were perhaps the most noxious misconceptions that Sowell wanted to expunge.
Indeed, in 1976, Sowell published Patterns of Black Excellence, to explore the factors that drove the performance of a number of successful black schools during Jim Crow and state-sponsored racial oppression. One was the Dunbar school in Washington, DC, which sent a higher percentage of its graduates to college than any white public high school in Washington, and from 1870 to 1955 repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests.
Many in this room are familiar with the nearly 5,000 Rosenwald schools that Booker T. Washington built exclusively for black children in fourteen states across the American South, graduating luminaries like Maya Angelou and Senator John Lewis.
Rather than accept the popular notion of persistent black failure, Sowell challenged us to understand how these seemingly under-resourced schools overcame the indignities and inadequacies imposed by legal segregation. If black excellence could occur under those conditions then, we can do it now! That has been the animating belief of my life.
Sowell observed that “one small, but important, part of the advancement of black Americans has been educational achievement. Here, as in other areas, the pathology is well known and extensively documented, while the healthy or outstanding functioning is almost totally unknown and unstudied.”
As frustrated as Sowell was with those who suffer amnesia of the history of black educational excellence, he was equally vexed at the lack of understanding of what caused the tragic demise of these high performing all-black schools.
We all know that Brown versus Board of Education was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that unanimously ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The decision declared that the doctrine of “separate but equal” had no place in public education, stating that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” While the decision was hailed as a universal good, it was only Thomas Sowell who had the courage to criticize the flawed reasoning behind the decision.
The ruling correctly deemed state-enforced segregation unconstitutional. But as Sowell pointed out, the dismantling of the “separate but equal” legal doctrine carried with it an underlying rationale that separate black schools—even voluntarily segregated high-performing schools like Dunbar or the Rosenwald schools—were inherently inferior. This toxic belief led to the downfall of many of the best black schools like Dunbar and closure of nearly 5,000 Rosenwald Schools, arguably the greatest example of self-determination in black education.
Sowell wrote: “Much of what has been said about the [Brown] decision has treated the result as paramount and the reasoning as incidental. But today, it is painfully clear that the educational results of Brown have been meager for black children. Meanwhile, the kind of reasoning used in Brown has had serious negative repercussions on our whole legal system, extending far beyond issues of race or education.”
It is sheer blasphemy to criticize Brown v Board of Education. But it is this commitment to truth-telling that Thomas Sowell has practiced throughout his life to shatter unassailable myths, to buck conventional wisdom—not to be contrarian for contrarianism’s sake, but to call out when there is evidence to the contrary. That’s what inspires me and so many school leaders across the country.
To come full circle, I have spent the last fifteen years running public charter schools in low-income communities educating primarily black and Hispanic students, including Vertex Partnership Academies, our International Baccalaureate public charter high school in the Bronx organized around the four cardinal virtues of Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom. Our students recite these “I statements” each morning.
For Courage, the students say, “I reject victimhood and boldly persevere, even in times of uncertainty and struggle.” When our students say these words out loud, in unison, they are making a collective commitment for how they want to operate as individuals and as a community.
The goal is to inspire young people to have their own coming-of-agency moment to understand the pathways through which they can become agents of their own uplift.
In our required Economics course, there is a unit entitled “Facts, Fallacies and Freedom: Thomas Sowell and the Pursuit of Truth.” High school students must read from Sowell’s Basic Economics, “Patterns of Black Excellence,” and Charter Schools and their Enemies. At the end of the unit, students will be able to do four things:
Think like social scientists, using evidence, logic, and data to evaluate claims.
Recognize myths and fallacies that distort public understanding of inequality and achievement.
Apply economic and sociological reasoning to real-world problems of opportunity and development.
Communicate empirically supported arguments about human potential.
And through my work at the American Enterprise Institute, this unit on Sowell will be included in the Agency curriculum we are distributing free of charge beginning in fall 2026, hoping to reach tens of thousands of high school students across the country.
The key is to develop independent, evidence-based thinkers by exposing students to independent, evidence-based thinkers. As an example, here are our students with Shelby Steele, another evidence-based contrarian, when he visited Vertex.
Shelby’s support has now helped us build a library where our students have access to great books like his own The Content of Our Character and Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities, and authors inspired by Thomas Sowell, like Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Roland Fryer, and of course the great Clarence Thomas. And on that note, here are our students with Justice Thomas at the Supreme Court, our fourth trip.
Thank you Justice Thomas. By the way, I can attest Justice Thomas did share with our students his grandfather’s admonition to reject victimhood: “Old man can’t is dead. I buried him.”
Our school motto is: There are no victims in our school, only architects of their own lives. The way we ensure that, is that unlike my upbringing, my students and hopefully thousands across the country will know the work and name of Thomas Sowell.
Thank you very much.
Ian V. Rowe
Ian V. Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he leads the FREE Initiative, which cultivates a deeper understanding of how family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship weave together a moral fabric that shapes children.
Ian is founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a network of character-based International Baccalaureate high schools inaugurated in the Bronx in 2022. He is the chairman of the board of Spence-Chapin, a nonprofit adoption services organization; and the cofounder of the National Summer School Initiative. He concurrently serves as a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center and as a writer for the 1776 Unites Campaign. He co-hosts the Invisible Men podcast with Nique Fajors.
Ian’s recent book is Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power (Templeton Press, 2022). His previous article for the Journal of Free Black Thought was “Why My Students Recite the Preamble to the Constitution.” He appeared on the Free Black Thought Podcast in an episode titled “Family Structure Over Everything.” Follow him on X here.
An earlier version of this article previously appeared on the AEI website.
An inspiring read. I was very impressed by Ian Rowe when I heard him on the Loury/McWhorter podcast a few years ago. Thanks JFBT.
👏👏👏 God bless you, Ian Rowe for the work you do with Vertex Partnership Academies! This is an absolutely epic speech every black American and every American needs to hear! You’re parents came to this country as immigrants from Jamaica and they worked hard to give you a good life. They and you epitomize the classic story of the American Dream! Unfortunately, your high school was right smack in the middle of a time of great racial divide and tensions as the once predominately Jewish neighborhood was being transformed with the arrival of hundreds of black families moving in.
The Jewish and black students who lived in the neighborhood were not getting along. So the
school district voted to open up an annex in
nearby Rosedale, a predominantly Irish and Italian community. All the Jewish families transferred their kids to this new annex.
I think they did so for a variety of reasons: racism and stereotypes about black people, resenting all the new black residents who they felt were displacing them, their neighborhood changing and slowly losing its Jewish identity, cultural and religious differences, problems with discipline breaking down in the school, and concerns the black students might pose a threat in some way to their children. So they transferred their kids to the annex feeling safer and more secure around the Irish and Italians who were culturally closer to them and the neighborhood was safe and got more funding from the federal government. Black parents were outraged and fearful. Wherever the white kids went, that’s where the money went they reasoned. But Ian disagreed, just because a school is all-black doesn’t mean it’s a bad school. Ian’s parents were worried by what they were hearing from their fellow parents and pondered if whether they should transfer their son to a predominantly white school. But Ian talked them into letting him stay and he was 100% right as he received an excellent public education and tested into Brooklyn Tech one of only three specialized high schools in New York City. He then went on to graduate with flying colors from Cornell University and Harvard University. Ian would then go on to open Vertex Partnership Academies all-black charter schools that teach students the values of faith, family and hard work and empowers them rather than teaching them victimhood.
He correctly points out that coddling black students and not holding them to the same standards as white students is wrong and not helpful to them. For example, Thomas Sowell quit Cornell University because he wanted to expel a black student who misbehaved and they refused to let him do so feeling he should get a pass because he was black. I also want to applaud Ian for amplifying Thomas Sowell’s critique of Brown v. Board of Education. Was it overall a great thing for America? Of course. But an unintended side effect of Brown v. Board was that it assumed all all-black schools were bad and inherently unequal. The sad irony is that there were many excellent all-black schools in this country, this was one of the categories in which black people had made significant gains between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
This meant the demise of great black schools like Dunbar Academy in Washington D.C. and the Rosenwald Schools. This is a tragedy! These schools were national treasures that produced hundreds of thousands of brilliant and talented black men and women including black luminaries like civil rights hero John Lewis and poet Maya Angelou. Shame on those who dismantled these amazing institutions of learning! Demolishing them is akin to the fire that destroyed the great Library of Alexandria several millennia ago! I’m glad that Ian is keeping the spirit of these schools alive with Vertex! The cardinal virtues he has his students recite every morning of Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom are values all schools could benefit from adopting! As part of the first pillar of Vertex students reject victimhood and persevere as their ancestors did in times of struggle.
They might well face racism in their lives, but it can’t stop them from living their dreams and being all they can be. I propose that Dunbar Academy be revived in Washington D.C. and that new Rosenwald Schools be opened in the urban ghettos of the North and South to as they did in the past, provide black students with an excellent education and provide them with a pipeline out of poverty, misery and crime. I also recommend every American and every teacher and educator read Thomas Sowell’s 1976 book Patterns of Black Excellence! Thank you to Free Black Thought for republishing Ian’s tremendous speech that we all could stand to learn from. God bless Thomas Sowell an American treasure, for empowering young black men and women like Ian! Professor Sowell should receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Trump for his service to this nation.