How Thomas Sowell Thankfully Made Me A Contrarian Educator

Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, examines Thomas Sowell’s challenge to conventional wisdom on issues at the cross-section of race and education. Demonstrating Sowell’s firm belief that academic standards should not conform to low expectations around race, Rowe cites “Patterns of Black Excellence,” in which Sowell examines how students at Washington, DC’s Dunbar High School achieved educational excellence despite the indignities and inadequacies imposed by legal segregation. As Rowe notes from Sowell’s research, Dunbar sent a higher percentage of its graduates to college than any white public high school in the city and repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests.

Rowe also discusses Sowell’s critique of the reasoning behind Brown v. Board of Education. While the decision correctly strikes down state-enforced segregation, Sowell argues that the Court’s reasoning advances the assumption that separate black schools, including those that fostered academic excellence, are inherently inferior. Rowe explains how this belief contributed to Dunbar’s decline and the closure of nearly five thousand Rosenwald schools. He credits Sowell with demonstrating the importance of holding students to high expectations and inspiration to overcome difficult circumstances, reject victimhood, and become “architects of their own lives.”

Recorded on October 20, 2025.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ian Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on education and upward mobility, family formation, and adoption. Mr. Rowe is also the cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a network of virtues-based International Baccalaureate high schools inaugurated in the Bronx in 2022; the chairman of the board of Spence–Chapin, a nonprofit adoption services organization; and the cofounder of the National Summer School Initiative. He is the author of Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for all Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power (2022).