Cultivating Agency, Character, and Citizenship: A Visit to Vertex Partnership Academies

Quick Overview

Ian Row, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, argues that cultivating a sense of agency—the ability to control one's destiny guided by moral discernment—is the critical missing element in modern education, contrasting it with debilitating narratives of 'blame the system' and 'blame the victim.'

Key Points: Vertex Partnership Academies integrates academic rigor with character formation, focusing on the four cardinal virtues: courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. Row defines agency as 'the force of your free will guided by moral discernment,' which is instilled through daily recitations of 'I statements,' such as 'I reject victimhood' for courage. The school teaches the 'success sequence' (education, work, marriage, children in that order) which data shows leads 97% of millennials who follow it to avoid poverty. Vertex faced a lawsuit from the teachers union attempting to block its opening in August 2022, but a judge threw out the case on August 16th, allowing the school to graduate its inaugural class accepted to top universities. Row advocates for teaching history 'warts and all,' countering narratives like the 1619 Project with resources like '1776 Unites' to provide a full story, including the context of Black Wall Street before the Tulsa Massacre. A five-point plan for scaling educational change includes eliminating barriers to school choice, teaching the success sequence as a probabilities class, focusing on the 'distance to 100' achievement metric over racial gaps, and expanding content-rich curricula.

Context: The discussion centers around Ian Row, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a network of public charter high schools launched in the Bronx in 2022. Row's philosophy, detailed in his book Agency, centers on empowering young Americans with a sense of control over their fate by providing an alternative to victimhood narratives, emphasizing moral formation alongside academic excellence.