About

Buy Ian Rowe's book here!

Ian Rowe is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on education and upward mobility, family formation, and adoption. Mr. Rowe is also the co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based International Baccalaureate high schools opening in the Bronx in 2022; the chairman of the board of Spence-Chapin, a nonprofit adoption services organization; and the co-founder of the National Summer School Initiative. He concurrently serves as a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center and a writer for the 1776 Unites Campaign.

Until July 1, 2020, Mr. Rowe was CEO of Public Prep, a nonprofit network of public charter schools based in the South Bronx and Lower East Side of Manhattan. Before joining Public Prep, he was deputy director of post secondary success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and public affairs at MTV, director of strategy and performance measurement at the USA Freedom Corps office in the White House, and co-founder and president of Third Millennium Media. Mr. Rowe also joined Teach for America in its early days.

Mr. Rowe has been widely published in the popular press, including in the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Examiner. He is often interviewed on talk radio programs. He is also the author of a forthcoming book tentatively titled “Agency” (Templeton Press), which seeks to inspire young people of all races to build strong families and become masters of their own destiny.

Mr. Rowe has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was the first black editor-in-chief of The Harbus, the Harvard Business School newspaper; a BS in computer science engineering from Cornell University; and a diploma in electrical engineering from Brooklyn Technical High School (Brooklyn Tech), one of New York City’s elite public schools, which specializes in science, technology, and mathematics.

Nique Fajors' summation of experience includes launching 85 retail and e-commerce products and services generating $2.1 billion over the last 15 years. He is a business thought leader who has been quoted in New York Times, Financial Times, and Business Week. His last start-up One Spear Entertainment launched the first mobile game titles for Shaquille O'Neal, Jet Li, and Muhammad Ali. He sold that company in 2017. Presently, he is EVP at Premium, a leading provider of third party labor and software solutions for customer facing industries. He holds a B.S.B.A. with honors from the Suffolk University Frank Sawyer School of Management and a M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School as a Time Warner Scholar.

His academic pursuits include writing Cultural and Economic Revitalization - A Five Step Reference For Overcoming Black Failure in 1996 and creating and executive producing The Invisible Men in 1993. He is an Adjunct Lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis within the Olin Business School and Rice Business School in Houston. He has traveled throughout Europe, Japan, China, East and West Africa, and the Middle East. And is proudly the father of three children better than him.