Ian Rowe

The article I want to talk about comes from the New York Post.

It's an opinion piece by Ian Rowe, and of course, we know Ian.

It's entitled, Nicole Hannah-Jones Accidentally Gave Us a Vital Lesson on School Choice.

And so if you are paying any attention to the world of education and opinion pieces and essays in the last seven days, you have heard about, maybe read for yourself, this essay that Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote.

And so I'm going to leave my opinions about that particular essay to the side because I have to tell you, Albert, it's complicated when you talk about parents of means who are making decisions, you know, intentionally about sending their kids to a school that they know is not performing well and just what they believe they'll be able to change.

I have some very strong opinions about that that I'm going to leave out for the sake of this conversation.

But what is important here and what Ian Rowe talks about in particular in his opinion piece is that what she is doing in her essay is really talking about the need for choice.

And that's what I want to touch on just for a moment.

But I'm also now a sociologist and I can tell you that kids who got the benefit of being raised by their own parents, Married parents just do generally, you know, markedly better.

And we've got a new report, Ian Rowe, Grant Bailey, and I from the Institute for Family Studies and from the American Enterprise Institute, kind of looking at how this all plays out for school-age kids across America.

And we're finding this new report is that kids who have the benefit of an intact family are doing a lot better when it comes to their GPAs, when it comes to schools contacting their parents for problems at school.

And then also when it comes to kind of their emotional well-being when it comes to depression.

Why don't we incorporate policy into these kind of things?

Yeah, this is a great question you're asking, Lauren.

Ian Rowe at AEI and Grant Bailey and I at IFS have a new report looking at what's called the Nation's Report Card, which kind of gives educators, policymakers, journalists, parents a sense of how our kids are doing in schools across America.

This is from the federal government.

Those are the type of things, understanding the decision-making.

And there's a guy named Ian Rowe.

uh overthink buffs he did a great job breaking down some of those plays and when i saw some of it i said hey man dog you really know what you're talking about that's cool like um and when i saw that it helped me like a math problem i can ask all of you guys what's 7 000 times 54.

If you put it in chat GPT, cool, you will get the answer.

I think There was one line in particular where you had a school administrator saying, you know, in our pursuit of anti-racism, we have to be certain that we are not watering down standards because that would be another form of racism.

I mean, that is almost verbatim the sort of thing that I would see published in essays by Ian Rowe or Thomas Chatterton Williams or others.

John McWhorter.

So that is, I think, a pretty potent acknowledgement.

I mean, poor, poor girl.

On the choices that are out there, I just want to plug, if I could, my interview with Ian Rowe on today's Battlegrounds.

God, that guy's doing fantastic work.

And then it's just so ludicrous to me, guys, that instead of advocating for people who have lesser means available to have choice, to advocating for school choice, you're advocating for people who actually do have the means to choose to give up that choice.

Well, okay, there's so much more to get into that, but just a couple more steps until we get there.

You know Ian Rowe, of course.

He does a lot of work with Children's Scholarship Fund.

I recently interviewed him on the Going Big podcast.

And part of his own personal story is the remarkable – part about how his parents, immigrants from Jamaica in New York, wanted nothing more than to maximize the educational opportunities for their two sons, one of them being Ian Rowe.

And he tells the story about decisions they made constantly to give him the best education possible.

At the end of the day, is that the fundamental premise? You're trying to help those families who have financial constraints, maybe constrained by the zip code in which they live, to give greater opportunity for their children in terms of how they may educate themselves and identify their gift and make something much more of their lives.

However, one of the most important, if not the most important, factor influencing student educational achievement and attainment is family structure.

As education scholar Ian Rowe has noted, NAEP already collects data on students' family structure, it just does not make those data publicly available.

The Department of Education, or whichever agency collects such data long term, should make student data available by family structure to the public, including as part of its Data Explorer tool.

As discussed above, data collection efforts should be consolidated under the Census Bureau.