ReFOCUS with Jim Daly

Ian Rowe: Anyone has within their capacity, remember this idea of the tools of self-renewal, the tools of self-betterment: strong family, strong faith, strong education. That's what leads to the entrepreneurial way of life where you can overcome the inevitable hurdles that are certainly going to come your way, but you can lead your life with dignity and meaning and purpose.

Jim Daly: That's Ian Rowe sharing his passion for helping children succeed in education and have a positive impact on the world. What a great goal. Thanks for joining me for this episode of ReFocus with Jim Daly, a podcast production of Focus on the Family.

In this recent conversation, Ian unpacks why strong families matter, why education reform is essential, and how Christians can speak into racial issues with both truth and grace, offering solutions grounded in biblical wisdom and common sense. I thought this discussion would be a great one to share during Black History Month.

If you care about the future of our children—all children—our educational system and the cultural conversation surrounding race, and the opportunities in America, then stick with us. Ian Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a respected voice on education, upward mobility, family formation—we need a lot more of that—and adoption.

He spent years working on the front lines leading public charter schools in the South Bronx, promoting adoption and foster care initiatives—I love this guy—and advocating for policies that genuinely help kids break cycles of poverty and discover their God-given potential.

He spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, known as ARC. He spoke at their conference in London, which I attended, so that's how we met. And he gave a brilliant speech there about concepts that we're going to discuss. I really appreciate that he's challenging the cultural narratives that often trap young people in a mindset of victimhood. Instead, he offers a hopeful, empowering alternative that helps children of every background to flourish. Let's jump into this thoughtful discussion now with Ian Rowe on ReFocus with Jim Daly.

Ian, thanks for joining me today on ReFocus. I appreciate it.

Ian Rowe: Oh, I'm so happy to be here.

Jim Daly: We met in London, I think at the ARC conference. It’s such a gathering. It’s kind of an eclectic group, but this group gathers once a year. It's building. Jordan Peterson and Katie Faust and others have pulled that together. Baroness Philippa Stroud is part of that, one of the leaders.

It’s really an acronym for Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It is kind of a global movement right now, and we’re not going to concentrate on this, but I just want to give people the backdrop of what’s happening globally. There seems to be a rather conservative approach to the way things are done—education, energy, all kinds of topics that relate to a more conservative viewpoint. It's believer and non-believer; that's what I mean by the eclectic gathering.

Ian Rowe: Ironically, I just mentioned that I was in Atlanta yesterday. The reason I was in Atlanta was to help Philippa Stroud and her husband David launch the Forum in Atlanta, which is an extension of ARC. They’re moving from the global event, where you had nearly 5,000 people in England, now to localities where people who are, as you say, eclectic, interested in solving problems but are tired of the ideological divide and want to connect on some core virtues: recognizing our common humanity, our individual dignity, this idea of equality of opportunity.

Last night we had a really powerful discussion with all these people in Atlanta who were coming together for the first time, recognizing that they’re not alone, that there are others who want to go a different path to solving problems that face us as a society.

Jim Daly: That seems to be what’s afoot right now. When people ask what the Lord is doing, what His hand is doing, I think as believers we could see that there seems to be quite the shift in the way we’re viewing things and the way we’re approaching problem-solving.

But let’s dive into your story. Your parents immigrated to the US via England from Jamaica. Do I have that correct? Tell me a bit about your mom and dad and their journey and why they ended up in America.

Ian Rowe: First of all, thank you for having me on. Like with so many of us, what we’re doing later in life is some function of the values that our parents instilled in us, and that’s certainly true of me. My parents were both born and raised in Jamaica, West Indies. My dad was working as an accountant, my mom was working as a nurse. They met each other, they fell in love, they started courting one another.

The stories were wonderful. My dad used to pick my mom up on horseback for their dates in the country. Really beautiful. But my dad reached what he believed was the apex of what he could achieve in education in Jamaica, and at the time the country was an English commonwealth. So he left to pursue his studies.

Within a few months, he was missing what they called each other, "Buds," which was their nickname for each other. So he wrote for her hand in marriage, because at the time in England you couldn’t get married unless you had written permission from her parents. Think of that. Old school, but good. Totally old school. So he wrote the letter of a lifetime, sent it to Lewis in the country in Jamaica and asked my mom's parents for her hand in marriage.

There was a lot of consternation—who’s this—they knew him, but they were strong faith people, the whole family. And they said yes. So my mom took a boat all by herself at 19 years old, a 5,000-mile journey across the Atlantic from Jamaica to England. They got married. They first had my brother, then seven years later they had me.

My parents were wonderful. They started an adventure together. They were married for 48 years before my dad passed away. They always believed that finding the right mate is fundamental to your life. Anchoring your life in faith, anchoring your life in education was the core. And of course, just building a great family. And so they came to the United States in 1968.

Jim Daly: I wanted to ask you about that influence of your parents. I think that may be one of the things that is a former bridge that now we don’t have as strongly as we once had in terms of those parental inputs, expectations, and what it means to be a man in this culture. I've got two boys of my own, 25 and 23, and so many things they have gotten right, which I'm so pleased with. I remember Trent dating, running to get the door of his girlfriend. I'm like, "Where did he learn that?" because I didn't do that for Jean, and now I'm going, "I need to do that for my wife."

Ian Rowe: Exactly. There you go.

Jim Daly: But just these things that show chivalry, that show the right attitude. It’s broader than just a Christian commitment. Christian commitment is core, obviously, but then it’s just being a good citizen and what is expected, and how do we deploy and help our children learn to do that. It seems like it’s cracked and broken today, at least in the US.

Ian Rowe: We have some work to do because it’s about having that core as well as being strong enough to withstand the perceived notions of others. You just said, "What does it mean to be a man?" I remember my dad always saying this: In Jamaica, he was a man. It’s a country predominantly made up of mostly Black people. And so he was a man.

It wasn’t until he came to the United States that he realized, or he was told, "Actually, you're a Black man." For those people saying it, that had meaning. That meant that you, to some degree, were a second-class citizen or you had to be careful about what you said or you had to be careful about what your aspirations were because in this country, you’re a Black man, and so inherently that curtails the opportunities that you have. My dad was just like, "What are you talking about?"

He instilled that in us, too—that it was about our core behaviors, our core beliefs, and almost creating a defense shield against some of these narratives that young people in particular are groomed to start to believe. That somehow, because of my race, because of my gender, because of my economic class, because of these characteristics, somehow I'm inherently marginalized or oppressed, or somehow I'm a victim of these forces outside of my control.

My parents very much tried to instill in us that it’s not that you’re not going to face hurdles in your life, but it’s not that these hurdles are insurmountable. The most important thing is it’s about your preparation. Are you ready when opportunities come your way?

Jim Daly: I think that's where I wanted to go next, and we're going to unpack many of these social issues, but the draw you had toward education—did you also get this from your parents? Were they involved in education, and is that what gave you the appetite?

Ian Rowe: They weren't educators themselves, but they made sure you were educated. I know that feeling. In many facets of our life, my parents, when we first came to the United States, we moved to Brooklyn, we ultimately moved to Queens. Frankly, they did not like what they saw when they were looking at other young Black men and how they were being raised—either young men in single-parent households that seemed to be unsupervised, or they just didn't like the outcomes of what they saw so many young Black men experiencing. So for me, my parents very much were on lockdown in the sense of education. That was my job.

Jim Daly: You went to church, you went to school, they were insistent you get a good education.

Ian Rowe: That was it. I went to church, I went to school, we had family events, and that’s pretty much it.

Jim Daly: Let me ask you this question because I was in a total dysfunctional family, broken. I'm the last of five kids, way last—I’m six years away from my closest sibling. I was literally the "oops" baby. That’s how my mom would introduce me. "This is our accident, Jimmy."

Ian Rowe: Oh, no.

Jim Daly: But my mom died when I was nine. She had remarried after my parents divorced. Then I was in foster care for a year, with my dad again for one year, then with my brother. My biodad died when I was 11 or 12. Here’s the point that I’m driving toward. I really didn’t have somebody saying, "You need a good education."

I kind of felt it, I say that, but I felt like I knew it. Like my only ticket out was getting a good education, going to college. So at the end of high school, I didn't stop. I said, "I gotta get to college." And there was no support mechanism for me, and my back was up against the wall. But I felt the insistence, the need to be able to do that. This is a valid point. You and I both are coming from different experiences, but something in us saying—whether you had structure, you had great parents encouraging you, that's wonderful—or you had this sense of, "I gotta get this done because I kind of like eating." Right? You like to eat and have shelter, and I’m going to need to do that. But you probably see that whole broad spectrum of students in your school.

Ian Rowe: I’ve had, frankly for 30 years, the pleasure of working with kids from a wide range of backgrounds—poor kids, rich kids, white kids, Black kids, Asian kids, Hispanic kids—kids growing up in situations just like you've described: very challenged families, dysfunctional, domestic abuse, domestic violence. Unfortunately, I've now been in this work long enough where I've seen young adults, as they enter young adulthood, unfortunately start making decisions where they recreate the same dysfunction that they experienced growing up. That's a tragedy to see.

But I've also been in this work long enough that I have seen young people in those same exact conditions make different sets of decisions where they have a future orientation. They have a vision for their life, a vision for a family, a vision for the education they want to pursue, a vision for their faith. Something has put them on a different path. They were on a different trajectory; they start to make different decisions to have a positive orientation of their life.

The animating question of my life is what makes the difference. What makes the difference for those kids who are in conditions like the ones that you just described for yourself? Other kids who grow up in what you just described—the story is not always so rosy. But something happened with you that really made the difference. My observation is that young people able to break that cycle of disadvantage, the thing that I've seen that they had in common, was this idea that they had a sense of personal agency—a belief that they could lead a self-determined life with meaning and purpose.

Usually, at least in my experience, young people who are able to break this cycle of disadvantage, they embraced family—not necessarily the family that they were from, but the family that they were on the pathway to form. And we can talk about that very important distinction.

Usually they had some kind of personal religious faith commitment. They lived by a set of moral virtues. There are some tenets, and they were part of a community of people that loved them and expected them to live up to that moral virtue. These young people I saw able to break the cycle of disadvantage also benefited from some kind of educational freedom, school choice. They were able to go to a school that actually saw possibility in them.

Finally, if they were on the pathway to form a strong family, had a personal faith commitment, benefited from educational freedom—that created, in my view, what I call an entrepreneurial mindset. They had a belief that they could become a problem solver in their own lives. Those four pillars—Family, Religion, Education, and Entrepreneurship—I call FREE. That’s my FREE framework for how now we’re trying to develop young people so that they can achieve that same sense of personal agency.

Jim Daly: My life story is pretty much what you've just described. It's why I have so much respect and love for teachers, because teachers meant the world to me. They gave me the structure I didn't have at home. So I loved doing homework. I loved getting A's. I loved driving toward that. I didn't always get A's; don't let me give you the wrong impression. But I loved doing well.

Same with sports; sports gave me that structure as well. But teachers were the ones, I think, that helped me to understand that I have agency. Let me go back to that. Describe what that means and then as an educator—and maybe as a parent, this is one of our goals—is how do we give that agency? We aim toward providing that for our kids so they know they can overcome, they can do big things, they can dream big things. Define agency.

Ian Rowe: My definition of agency has really come out of looking at 30 years of working with lots of different kinds of young people. There is this sense, at least in our country today, that based on your race, your class, your gender, your zip code wherever you live in, you’re getting these messages that the system is rigged against you. Somehow all these structures are in place, designed for your destruction. Even capitalism is evil. These larger structures somehow are aligned against your own development.

If you hear that over and over and over and over again, you start to believe it. You start to believe that maybe it’s true, maybe this system is rigged. And so therefore I don’t have any personal agency. I need all these systems to change first in order for me to be successful. So I call that kind of the "blame the system" narrative.

But on the flip side, there’s another narrative which is that America's great, America's not oppressive, you're not in an oppressive nation. America's land of opportunity. If you're not successful, it's because you haven't pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. You have not taken advantage of all these opportunities that exist in this country. So that’s what I call the "blame the victim" metanarrative.

It’s either "blame the system" or "blame the victim." Either the system is rigged against you, or you have not done enough to take advantage of all these opportunities. There’s not a lot of space between those two narratives. I think many young people are trapped between these two narratives because they basically rob a young person of this idea that they can lead a life of their own choosing.

I have posited agency as the empowering alternative to the "blame the system" and "blame the victim" narrative. I define agency as the force of your free will guided by moral discernment. The force of your free will guided by moral discernment. Every one of us has free will, but the question is how is it exercised. There are lots of people with free will who have done lots of bad things.

If you think of agency like a vector or velocity, where velocity is not just speed, it’s speed and direction. So the question for a young person: In what direction, how do you exercise this free will toward what end? To your own betterment, to the betterment of your community? How are you going to make those choices? This idea that agency is your free will guided by moral discernment is how I’m trying to help young people recognize that if I embrace those four pillars, I will ultimately develop the capacity for moral discernment so that the decisions I make in my life will not only be enhancing for me, but hopefully for that of my community, my family.

Jim Daly: Which is terrific, and I think that is the best recipe for success in life. Let me tap into what young people are experiencing, whether it’s elementary school, junior high, high school, or universities. There seems to be this dogma—and I’ve seen it, I’ve heard it, even through my own sons—that the US is not a good place. It’s inherently bad, it’s racist, all those things. To a degree, some of that is true, but it’s always an evolving culture.

I think one of the beauties of the Constitution is it gives opportunity for us to correct wrongs—maybe not perfectly, but that’s the great thing about capitalism and the democracy that we’re in, a republic. It gives us the agency, the capacity to do better, whether it’s regarding slavery or labor issues, child labor laws like the Industrial Revolution. These things became refined over time. Should they have had to happen? Of course not. But you have to start with where you’re at and then build on what those that have gone before us have built.

Let me give you an example. I can't remember the historian—I think he was from Stanford—but we did a podcast with him. He was an African-American man and educator. He said, if you look at it from this perspective, slavery was a 3,000-year-old industry that was global. These men in the United States went against Britain, their country, formed a Constitution, formed a nation that again, a 3,000-year-old industry was active with. Wilberforce in the United Kingdom was fighting it as well.

He said they laid down the pathway, the Constitution. They couldn’t implement it then for political reasons; people can jab at the moral weakness of that. But it only took like 80 years for Lincoln to arise and be able to use the document that they formed to apply it more perfectly. Not many people think of it in that context. What a different prism to look at in terms of how we get better.

Ian Rowe: Alexis de Tocqueville, back in the mid-1800s, was a Frenchman touring the United States, really just trying to understand what made this country so special. He wrote a book called *Democracy in America*, and he wrote, "The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

I’ve always found that quote very profound because it suggests that our country has within itself the tools of self-renewal, the tools of self-betterment: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights. All of these documents are the pillars that have allowed us to right wrongs. Where else in the world has this kind of evolution happened so rapidly for so many different types of people who were in the categories of being marginalized or enslaved, who now have increasingly been able to lead lives of their own choosing?

In our school, Vertex Partnership Academies, each morning our students recite the Preamble to the Constitution. "We the People... to secure the blessings of liberty." The reason we have our students recite the Preamble is that we want them to know that they can take ownership of our country, too. It is part of their responsibility to keep us on this arc of continuous improvement as a nation.

Fundamentally, we want our students to know that just like the country has the tools of self-renewal and self-improvement and self-betterment, they as students have those same tools within themselves. They have the capacity to change. They have the capacity for intellectual humility—for understanding new ideas, to abandon ideas that they've learned are incorrect in the face of new evidence. Everything, we have to be in this mode of continuous improvement, constant motion.

When I hear the narratives that you’re talking about—because it’s very much in the "blame the system" camp—"No, this country is oppressive, it’s 400 years of slavery." Okay, there’s certainly the history. But is it insurmountable? Are there lots of data points that actually suggest that perhaps whatever the legacy has been, there’s a very different reality now?

And if you accept that, then the challenge just becomes, "Okay, what’s the pathway for success?" That’s why this FREE framework that we’ve created—we think it’s so powerful because it helps young people understand it’s not random. It’s not random, your possibility of being successful. There is wisdom of the ages. If you form a strong family, if you have a strong personal faith commitment, if you get a high-quality education, you are very likely to do great things in your life. It’s very important we send young people that counter-message to what they may be hearing with too much frequency.

Jim Daly: That has to feel a bit like David and Goliath. Here you are in this school teaching virtue, value, Constitution, probably the Bible as a book of Western civilization. I get it. My boys attended a classical academy. I'm so glad they did, and it taught them amazing things. But it seems to be a drop of pure water in an ocean full of the dogmas that we’ve been talking about.

You look at public schools—not to demean public schools—but there seems to be these two agendas that have emerged over the last 30, 40 years. The one being the things you’ve just said: that working toward values and virtues actually helps the nation become a more perfect nation, like the Preamble says. And then there’s those that think it needs to be entirely wiped out and rebuilt from the bottom up. And I’m thinking, these are centuries of wisdom speaking to us about what works.

An example of that—and we fight this every day—is the nuclear family. Even Jesus in the book of Matthew says, "A man shall leave his mother and father, cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." And somehow that’s a Western European concept. No, it actually came right out of the Middle East. So even those fundamental things that we used to agree on—that family is good, marriage is good, marriage defined as a man and a woman was good, and that the product of that is children and to raise them in a healthy way—is the best social buttressing for everything. I’m shocked at how we’re in a philosophical battle over these simple things that should be so self-evident.

Ian Rowe: What’s interesting about what you’re saying is that I’ve seen the same phenomenon, but it’s very fascinating that it’s only within certain demographic groups. If you look at, for example, college-educated or certain religious faith organizations, marriage is alive and well. You still have 80 to 90% of kids being raised in married two-parent households, passing on virtue, securing education, passing on commitments to religious faith.

But what you’re seeing in other communities—lower-income communities, non-college-educated—you’re seeing kind of a vacuum of this idea of knowing the script of life. Knowing that you should finish school, you should get a good job, you should court, you should adopt a religious faith, you should get married, and then you should have children. That was the script. That was the norm in our country in the 1960s.

We are now at a point where 40% of all children are born outside of marriage. That number was about 6 or 7% in the early 1960s. In the Black community, Patrick Moynihan wrote a report in 1965 highlighting the Black family, which at the time, the non-marital birth share was 23.6%. He was calling out, "Crisis, crisis, crisis!" saying that single parenthood is really now a force even worse than whatever the legacy of slavery might be. Today, in the Black community, the non-marital birth share is about 70%. Think about that.

You're right that things have shifted, but it's only within certain communities. And so I have some hope there because in the Bronx, in the community where we run our schools, the non-marital birth share is 84.5%. Meaning that nearly nine out of 10 babies are born outside of marriage. Our kids are not seeing the models that would show them what the ideal family structure is. But we teach it in our schools.

Jim Daly: I spoke to a Black man, older, probably 70 years old. Boy, that’s getting closer for me. But I was talking to him and he said, "One of the big changes that I’ve seen as an older man is when I was a boy, there were older men sitting on the porches of the neighborhood. And if we got—especially the boys—if we got a little rascally, these kind of town fathers would sort us out sitting on that porch." He said, "Now the problem: when I look at the neighborhoods, there's no more men sitting on the porches."

Ian Rowe: I would go further than that and say when he was growing up—if he’s in his 70s, that means in the '50s and '60s—80% of Black families were headed by married two-parent households. So not only did you maybe have the random guy on the porch who was the neighborhood elder, but you also had your father. You had your father in the home, married to your mother. A man who had first made a bond with his spouse, his wife, before then jointly making a bond and a commitment to a child.

That fundamental mechanism of human development is the thing that we’re missing. It’s not so much about not having enough men on the porch. If you go to places like Baltimore or Philadelphia, unfortunately you will see a lot of men on porches who are not working or wayward. Those aren't the men you want advising your kids. We need married fathers who are making commitments to women first, before children are even thought about.

We teach this in our schools. We talk about the importance of getting your education, getting a job, relationship—if you have children—marriage first. It’s very controversial. There are those that think we shouldn’t be teaching these things at all, but we feel compelled to do it.

Jim Daly: That’s the point. Dr. Brad Wilcox—I’m sure he’s somebody you’re aware of, a friend of Focus on the Family at University of Virginia—his social research is so strong. And others, too, around the country. It’s bulletproof. When you look at it, the most stable children come from intact two-parent loving mom and dad homes. No other family form comes close to delivering that.

Now, as a product of a single-mother household—me—you can overcome those things. But it takes a lot of people around you who believe in you, and it takes a great deal of insight, fortitude to overcome those shackles and fall a little further from the tree. Sometimes those negative things are great motivators.

I want to come back to that idea of agency. You stated in the book *Agency* that Christ is our greatest legacy and agency is His greatest gift to us. And you connect that concept through Hebrews 12:1 and 2. What is that scripture and how does it connect the dots here?

Ian Rowe: It’s all ultimately to this point that God has given us free will. He’s given us free will but the recognition that we truly have the ability to wield it in whatever direction we may so choose. Implicitly, though, He’s asking for something in return. Hebrews 12 is very much about this idea that "I'm giving you the power," but as the famous quote from Spider-Man says, "With great power comes great responsibility."

What I think God is signaling to us, and certainly what we signal to our kids: We’re giving you the tools. The tools that can become your vehicle through which you can lead the life that you want. But we need something in return. We need for you to embrace a set of virtues. We need for you to embrace a set of moral standards. Excellence in how you govern your life. Excellence in how you think about your family.

I was with a group of students actually yesterday and they were sharing that with the advent of artificial intelligence, now when they are assigned these senior theses and other important papers, there's a big temptation just to use these digital devices as the way to create. They said something very interesting. They said, "You know what? We wouldn’t do it because it would bring dishonor. Even if we were never found out, we would know that we cheated, that we didn’t show the best of ourselves."

That's the essence of Hebrews, of this message of agency—that you have the tool, you have within you the ability to make decisions. The question is what are you committing to in order to help you have a framework for making those difficult decisions?

The reason I run schools is that I want our students to know that they can do hard things. Even in the face of inevitable struggle, they have the capacity to make decisions that are toward the life of their choosing. But it doesn’t just happen; you’ve got to meet us halfway. That's why I make that reference in the book.

This idea of virtue typically comes from religious faith. One of the great tragedies, certainly over the last few decades as religiosity has gone down, is that young people have had this void filled by these ideological bugaboos—wokeness or anti-racism or climate change. You have to develop even like this religious fervency. You’re excommunicated if you don’t follow every single one of these tenets to the T. So we try to say to our young people, "Every human being is in need of spiritual nourishment, but be careful what you’re choosing to bring into your body in terms of that spiritual nourishment."

Jim Daly: I think that points to the fact that what they’re satisfied with is not what will satisfy them in the end. That’s what’s such an irony for those of us that do understand good and evil and the things the scripture talks about. Hebrews 12:1 and 2 says: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely. And let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." That’s a pretty powerful scripture right there. The endurance to run the race before us. And the key is you do not have to do it alone.

And that is huge in our lonely culture today. Ian, to frame this a little bit—one of your great concerns in the book *Agency* is related to our culture having more empathy and understanding for those who come from challenging situations. I’ll put it in a story form out of my own experience and let you react to it. I spent third grade and some of fourth grade in Compton, California, along with about three other white kids. It was predominantly Black and Hispanic, very poor.

I think the year I was living there, as I look back on it, it was the murder capital in the US. People died. I saw two yellow chalk lines; one guy was shot with a shotgun outside my bedroom window. I used to think, "See, I did it. I was able to climb out of that." I've tempered that, and I think it hits to this question about your encouragement to have empathy. I used to think, well, maybe because I had it together, I was pursuing school. But now I say, I was a white kid that got out of Compton. How many of my Black friends got out of Compton? I don't know, because I was only in third grade.

That kind of haunts me a little bit because I don't know if others, not in their own right, but did they get a ladder up? Did they get those people that came around them and helped them out? People saw something in them. I've tempered that. I think that’s what you’re driving at.

Ian Rowe: Thank you for sharing that story. The way that I think about these things—again, I’ve worked with some pretty tough communities and our schools. In the community in which I run schools now, only 7% of kids graduate from high school ready for college.

Jim Daly: What was that percentage again? Say it again.

Ian Rowe: Seven percent. Meaning that for about 2,000 kids that start ninth grade each year in this district, four years later those students have either dropped out or they did earn their high school diploma but still cannot do math nor reading without remediation. 93% of kids either drop out or you graduate from high school but you can't read, you can't compete on equal footing. You do what is expected of you, you finish your degree, you still can't. The numbers are atrocious.

The way that I like to think about this is that even in these communities where there’s such despair, there’s actually many families that are either successful or on their pathway to success or hungry for the information to become successful. One of my mentors, Bob Woodson, always says, "Well, if 70% of your community are involved in crime or they’re in single-parent homes, that means there’s 30% that probably are doing okay."

Maybe we should temper our obsession with failure and studying pathology. Why not at least start to say, "Wait a minute, so that 30%—what’s going on with those people? What is it about their lives, about their beliefs, about their attitudes that they’re able to see a different future?" If there’s anything that we can start to identify that is in common with those people, that 30% that seems to never hit the narrative—because the narrative is always, "Oof, well, race dictates your future. End of story."

Actually, it turns out married, healthy two-parent households—the poverty rate in married Black households has been in single digits for the entire time that that data has been collected by the Department of Labor.

Jim Daly: Wow, that's amazing.

Ian Rowe: It is amazing, isn’t it? Maybe we should make that more known and help more young people understand why marriage would be so important. It also turns out many of these young people had a personal faith commitment growing up in their lives. There’s a great study called *Black Men Making It in America*. It’s one of the few studies that studies successful Black men. They string together what are the common characteristics, and lo and behold: many of them are married, had children within marriage, personal faith commitment, they went to church on Sundays.

Let’s study success. Let’s study as obsessively as we study poverty and pathology. Let’s study productivity and prosperity in the same communities that we always seem to have this narrative of failure. So when you were growing up in Compton, yes, you were white, you made your way out of there, but there are a lot of probably other Black kids that made it out of Compton, too. I’m sure there were. Of course there were. But the question is what was the difference. Those are the ingredients of a flourishing life regardless of one’s race or background.

Jim Daly: Boy, that’s so true. Ian, you point out four cardinal virtues. I want to make sure we grab those, because listeners, this is the reason to get your book *Agency*. Courage, Justice, Temperance, Wisdom. Just give me the light reasons why these things are important to teach our children.

Ian Rowe: I’ve been running schools in the Bronx and Lower East Side of Manhattan since 2010. One of the first things you realize when you’re running schools, when you have kids for eight to 10 hours a day, whether you like it or not, you are in the moral formation business. You can choose not to recognize it or not be explicit; you can choose not to focus on character development. But if you choose not to be deliberate, then you’re leaving a void. And that void is going to be filled by ideas or values probably that you don’t want for your kids.

One of the first decisions we made when we launched our high school, Vertex Partnership Academies, was to organize the school around the four cardinal virtues: Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom. I want all of your listeners to project yourself in the Bronx, a room full of these beautiful students wearing their blazers and ties, standing strong and saying:

For Courage: "I reject victimhood and boldly persevere even in times of uncertainty and struggle."

For Temperance: "I lead my life with self-discipline because I am responsible for my learning and behavior."

For Justice: "I uphold our common humanity and honor the inherent dignity of each individual."

These are incredibly powerful words that when our students say them every morning, it goes beyond just reciting in your head. When you say it out loud in unison, it becomes a collective commitment for how we operate as a good society. The cardinal virtues—we spend a lot of time on math, it’s an International Baccalaureate school—but the most important thing that we’re doing every day is imparting these virtues.

Jim Daly: That’s the foundation. I remember being in South Africa, and it just so happened I was down there during the vote for Mandela. I remember talking to an older Black man who stood in the line for hours—some stood in line for days. I remember asking him, "Why is this important to you?" And he said, "Dignity. To be able to vote. It brings me dignity that I am a human being." That was just so powerful for me to hear. So often we take these things for granted in America; we can’t get enough people out to vote.

Ian Rowe: The reason we made the "I" statement for justice is: "I uphold our common humanity and honor the inherent dignity of each individual." If everyone really absorbed what those words mean—this idea of our common humanity, inherent dignity—then it would prohibit us from doing the kinds of things that are happening today, where we’re dehumanizing folks because they may share an opinion that is different than our own, or they may have a different skin color, or they may study a different religion.

7,000 people signed petitions to disinvite Charlie Kirk from even appearing at all, because they said these ideas are so dangerous we can’t even have this human being on campus to express them. We have to help young people understand not only that murder and violence can never be the answer, but also silencing people, dehumanizing them because they have ideas that are different from your own—we can’t do that either. Everyone is afforded inherent dignity. We set these "I" statements very deliberately, every single word. Our hope is that by our students reciting these in unison out loud every day, these words don’t just show up in their head, but ultimately they grasp them in their heart in terms of how they exercise the habits of moral virtue every single day.

Jim Daly: I couldn't agree more. Somebody had said speech is not hate, action is hate. We’ve got to be able to express ideas with one another in order for the right ideas to reach the top for the culture to embrace. That’s the goal. One of the things we’ve done recently is we created a documentary—it’s free; you can see it on X and YouTube. It’s about a 90-minute documentary called *Truth Rising*.

The concept in there is how do we make room for the right things to rise. The timing's perfect for this, and we actually dedicated the X launch of that to Charlie Kirk because he certainly qualified to be one of the several courageous Christians in there that have stood their ground. We have that right to do that very thing.

How do we bridge this gap? How do we talk to people who have very different views on what are the core moral principles? They wouldn’t agree perhaps with the cardinal virtues. They wouldn’t agree with the definition of sexuality and marriage and the purpose of marriage and procreation. They just see that as all a Western fabrication. When you started your school, you got sued immediately by the teachers' union because they opposed what you want to teach kids.

Ian Rowe: Yes, we did. I think this is the essence of the whole thing. The answer is you have to start early. People are asking this question at the college level: "How is it that these students seem to be so intolerant of ideas?" The reality is that this inability to deal with divergent opinion doesn’t originate on college campuses. It’s far more likely that kids are coming out of K-to-12 systems with, frankly, not really having been in environments where they have to grapple with opposing ideas or engage with a diversity of viewpoints.

In fact, there's a great study that shows high schoolers—somewhere between 40 to 50% of high school students self-censor because they’re fearful that if they do express an opinion that’s contrary to whatever the conventional wisdom is, they’ll be ostracized. Or maybe it will be in conflict with what they know their teacher believes because their teacher believes that they're a social justice warrior.

As a school leader, as an educator, I believe what we need to do is start far earlier. We need to value debate and engagement, discourse across difference. Even at our high school, we have something called High School Law Review, where we study Supreme Court cases and our students are reading original texts, trying to understand.

How do we normalize this idea that again: Justice—I uphold our common humanity and honor the inherent dignity of each individual. If we believe that, then we can have arguments. We can disagree. We can cite evidence because we know fundamentally, I uphold our common humanity. I’ll never dehumanize you because you have an idea that I think is bad. Of course we can disagree, but we’re kindred spirits. That is something we’re fighting for very much in the design of our school.

Jim Daly: In the film *Truth Rising*, it was Baroness Philippa Stroud who said this: "The distinction with Western civilization is that it embraced the biblical concept that we’re made in God’s image, and therefore everyone deserves dignity." And that lifted up Western civilization. Western civilization in its golden moment knew what it meant to be human. And now forces that are working against that are throwing disarray into that concept that really did lift up humanity out of poverty and so many great things.

I wanted to ask you for an example where you may have encountered somebody who thought differently in education—one of your peers. Have you been able to sit and have that kind of dialogue, and what did that look like and was it respectful?

Ian Rowe: I think I’ve built a reputation for being very open to speak with people who have extremely divergent opinions with me. I’ve done multiple debates on, for example, critical race theory. C-SPAN had me on to debate a professor at a university who was very steeped in critical race theory, and we talked about human flourishing. I fundamentally believe that race is not the determining factor for your life. I feel that there are far bigger decisions that will influence whether or not young people lead the lives of their own choosing: the health and stability of the family, the existence or not of religious faith, their access to high-quality schools.

I made my case and I think I won the debate. But the point is, I didn't hate this person or feel that she was inhuman. I thought she had bad ideas. I very much try to model that. I’ve debated Richard Reeves, who’s written a book called *Of Boys and Men*, and he has an idea that marriage as an institution is essentially dead. He believes we now need to divorce fatherhood from marriage.

I made my case. You may want to believe that fathers through some technical intervention will be connected to their kids, but there’s nothing like marriage to first bond a man to his wife and then together jointly make a bond and a commitment to a child. I don’t dislike Richard as a person; in fact, we’re friends, but we can disagree agreeably. I’m probably one of the few folks, certainly in the education arena, that proactively goes out and seeks people who publicly disagree with me, because I think the larger community can only benefit if they actually hear the arguments being made on all sides.

Jim Daly: That’s so true. I think right at the end here, hopefully people will pick up the book *Agency* by Ian Rowe. It’s terrific, the four-point plan: FREE—F-R-E-E—for all children to overcome the victimhood narrative and discover their pathway to power.

As believers, what would be your final reminder for all of us to model Christ’s love for the culture? So often I’ll preface it with this: We as Christians, our personalities can get in the way because our sin rises up, our flesh rises up, and we’ll go toe-to-toe. Secondly, it’s not the weapons of our warfare, which would be the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, kindness—kind of the opposite of what the world would want to do.

Ian Rowe: So often I interact with a lot of people who may say the right words but fundamentally don’t actually think young people have the capacity to lead self-determined lives. In their hearts, they believe that there are these structures, there are these systems. I say if you’re truly Christ-centered, you have to start with the belief that the people that you are advocating for actually are able.

With the right information, the right moral construct, the right personal faith, the right understanding of family structure, they can lead the life that they want. So often I feel like we’re fed a lie that you have to be dependent, that first this has to happen before you can celebrate your own freedom. Those are the gatekeepers that I fight against. The gatekeepers who in their own lives are quite happy to talk about the strength of their own marriage and how that’s so important.

The people we have sympathy for, we do need to have empathy for. Empathy in the context of they’re not lesser human beings. It’s our common humanity, the inherent dignity of each individual. Anyone has within their capacity—remember this idea of the tools of self-renewal, the tools of self-betterment: strong family, strong faith, strong education. That’s what leads to the entrepreneurial way of life where you can overcome the inevitable hurdles, but you can lead your life with dignity and meaning and purpose.

Jim Daly: Ian, this has been wonderful. Thank you for being with me on ReFocus, and I look forward to seeing you at the next ARC conference.

Ian Rowe: Yes, I will see you there, Jim. Thank you very much.

Jim Daly: Well, I hope you’ve been encouraged by this conversation with Ian Rowe. What I appreciate so much about him is his unwavering belief in the potential of every child, no matter their background, their skin color, or their zip code. At a time when our culture often pushes young people toward hopelessness or a victimhood mindset, Ian offers a far more uplifting and biblically grounded vision, which is what I think this country here in America is all about.

I agree with him that every child is created by God, endowed with dignity and capable of making meaningful choices that shape their future. That’s called wisdom. His FREE framework—F-R-E-E—is such a valuable tool, and that’s how we build strong communities, healthy families, and a nation where opportunity is accessible to everyone. Ian also challenged us to engage the difficult conversations around race with both clarity and grace. As Christians, we have a responsibility to speak hope into the culture and refuse to reduce anyone to their hardships.

Scripture tells us that in Christ we are more than conquerors, and that truth shapes the way we see ourselves and the way we see others, which might be why there is such an onslaught against truth. If this conversation has stirred your heart or given you a fresh perspective, I want to encourage you to take a step: mentor a young person, support a struggling family, look for ways to strengthen your local schools, or simply start talking about these issues with a spirit of humility and courage.

Now let me turn the corner for the inbox segment. Today, here’s some feedback from Lisa, who writes this: "I started listening to this podcast about six months ago. It has been a wealth of information on how to navigate and handle the culture as a follower of Christ." Man, that is great that it’s hitting the nail on the head, Lisa.

She goes on to say, "I can’t thank you guys enough for having these difficult conversations and offering hope on the other side of them. I feel educated, empowered, and hopeful after each podcast." Well, Lisa, that’s a real encouragement for us here at Focus on the Family and the ReFocus team. And since I shared your comments, I’m going to send you a copy of my book, *ReFocus: Living a Life that Reflects God’s Heart*.

If you have a comment for me or a question, you can leave me a voicemail simply by clicking the link or tab. I also mentioned our *Truth Rising* documentary, which is free to view. You can see it on X or YouTube, and you can also do the follow-up with a free four-part study to help you share God’s love and truth in our culture. Visit truthrising.com to watch the film and be part of the study.

Thanks for joining me for ReFocus with Jim Daly. Share the podcast with your friends and like, listen, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Next time on ReFocus, Aaron Renn helps us to develop and practice strategies to be effective witnesses and cultural influencers for Christ.

Aaron Renn: How do people see the light on the lampstand that’s uncovered? How do you win in this culture? How is what we are doing making us appear to other people? Is this making us look like a morally credible force in society, or is this making us look like anti-social elements or something of that nature?

Jim Daly: That’s coming up on Monday, March 9th, on the next ReFocus with Jim Daly.