“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.