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From Persecution to Prosperity, Ian Rowe Talks with the New Hampshire Board of Education

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i am going to turn this over to the commissioner to do the introduction here and to set up this next item on our agenda great thank you so much um so the next uh session that we're going to have here is really to begin some conversation with the board around some of the developing trends and conversations that are happening kind of across the country as well as in new hampshire around race and education and the intersection of those two we are seeing um at the department some emerging activity that's taking place across our state in some of our school systems that would be considered in in many ways sometimes controversial some of the content for example there is a class an enrichment class that is offered in one of our high school settings the title of which is called exploring whiteness and becoming an anti-racist activist and so that has raised the concerns of some parents that they have reached out to us and as an example some of the content in that class is also viewed as potentially controversial for example there is a quiz question in one of those classes that states the rise of the idea of white supremacy was tied most directly to and it is a multiple choice question for which the correct answer is identified in this quiz as the declaration of independence and so with the emergence of some of this stuff that is taking place again across the country and sometimes here in new hampshire i thought it was important that we began to open up some dialogue about that and i am more than excited to introduce to you uh ian rowe who has joined us i won't give you olivia's uh background because i think he might share some of that with us other than to let you know that ian is currently a resident fellow at the american enterprise institute where he really focuses on education issues upward mobility family formation adoption and has a really deep and rich background uh and and so we're just happy to welcome him and to let him share with us today so ian i will hand this over to you he's going to share some comments and then we can open it up for questions as well to the extent that the board has any follow-up that they want to do so welcome me into new hampshire virtually uh thank you very much commissioner edo blue and thank you chairman klein and all of the members of the state board of education uh as uh commissioner edelblue said my name is uh ian rowe and it's a great honor to be with you today uh and i'm joining you today really with two hats on as well my first as commissioner mentioned i am a resident fellow at the american enterprise institute uh i'm also a member of 1776 unites which is a black-led non-partisan and intellectually diverse alliance of writers thinkers activists really trying to craft solutions to some of our country's greatest challenges in education family culture upward mobility it was launched in february of 2020 by civil rights movement veteran robert woodson and the number of black leaders who acknowledge america's history of racial discrimination yet recognize the pathways taken by millions of black people past and present who are not bound by a defeatist ideology the scholars and activists leading 1776 unites are determined to spark a movement to liberate tens of millions of americans of all races to become agents of their own uplift by embracing and not rejecting the true founding values of our country so that's one hat that i'm here uh the second hat i i'm here i i come with you also just as an educator i myself am a proud product of the new york city public school system kindergarten through 12th grade i graduated from brooklyn tech high school which is one of the specialized high schools in new york i got my degree in computer science engineering at cornell university and my mba from harvard business school and now i'm founding a new network of international baccalaureate high schools vertex partnership academies that will open in the south bronx next year and for the last 10 years i was the ceo of a non-profit network of public charter elementary and middle schools also in the south bronx and the lower east side of manhattan our faculty had the solemn responsibility to educate more than 2 000 students primarily low-income black and hispanic kids whose parents chose our schools because they wanted their children to develop the skills and habits to become agents of their own uplift and we had nearly 5 000 families on our waiting list all desperate for their kids to receive a high quality education and i would imagine similar to parents throughout new hampshire many of our families in low-income communities may have faced racial discrimination and other challenges in their own lives and fear that their children might as well but they knew that a great education a great education could make a huge difference they knew that their children might face closed doors because of america's legacy of slavery but they also knew and know that because of america's legacy of black excellence and resilience in the face of slavery and discrimination hundreds and thousands of doors are now open and young people of all races have the ability to open their own doors if they are prepared to capitalize on the opportunities at their fingertips this is very important right now as we as a country and in new hampshire are having critical conversations about race and racial disparities i know that you're considering a bill that defines and prohibits the dissemination of certain divisive concepts related to sex and race i mean and and it's a good time to have that conversation because around the country america's institutions whether it be colleges and universities businesses government the media our k to 12 schools are enforcing this cynical intolerant orthodoxy that requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color gender sexual orientation it pits us against one another and it diminishes what it means to be human in many instances we see faculty forced into professional development or even students in their classrooms divided by race and forced to confess their status as oppressor or oppressed so today almost 70 years after brown vs board of education ushered in the civil rights movement there's an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles to insist on our common humanity to demand that we are each entitled to equality under the law to bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin it's important that our kids know that they live in a good if not great country and one that is not hostile to their dreams millions of kids of all races have embraced the founding ideals around family faith hard work entrepreneurship and education to move from persecution to prosperity we acknowledge that america is not perfect but we want to confront the inequities the inequities that we face united rather than divided and commissioner edelblut that's an amazing uh question that you just asked of how somehow that the declaration of independence was the seed of white supremacy it contrasts very much with what martin luther king said in his address at the centennial anniversary of the emancipation proclamation and i'll quote the first paragraph of what he said quote if our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents its contribution to civilization would be imperishable the first of these documents is the declaration of independence and the other is that is that which we are here to honor tonight the emancipation proclamation all tyrants past present and future are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations no matter how extensive their legions how vast their power nor how malignant they're evil end quote it was it was a very profound statement martin luther king made more than 50 years ago and finally in chapter 13 of de tocqueville's america he said quote the greatness of america lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation but rather in her ability to repair her faults end quote i've always found that statement compelling because it resonates with the notion that america is always in pursuit of becoming a more perfect union while the founders laid out inspiring ideals we are in a constant effort to fully live up to them but how steady progress is through uniting around a common set of ideals civil discourse constructive disagreement and a strong foundation in civic understanding i really appreciate the opportunity to share some of these initial thoughts i will mention that in the appendix to my written testimony i have included a brief overview of the 1776 unites curriculum we did feel compelled to create something that could be freely distributed across the country an actual curriculum that ultimately will be pre-k through 12. that tells what we believe is empowering stories of the african-american experience in the united states warts and all the stories of challenge but the stories of incredible triumph over adversity and and the hope is that people of all races can learn from that ongoing power and resilience so thank you very much i look forward uh to chatting and engaging in this very important conversation

ian thank you yes i was muted momentarily i apologize thank you so much for your willingness to uh to join with us today and just share with some of your thoughts and then uh drew i'll turn it back over to you in case some of the members of the board have some follow-up questions for you yeah great and thank you ian um we appreciate your time any uh anyone on the board have questions or a discussion ryan go ahead hey nice to meet you ian so i must say that just hearing that whole spiel was literally like a drink of fresh water on a hot day because there's so much going on right now that's counter to what you just said out of your mouth but i know what you just said to be so true at least in my life and i've spread that message to anybody who will listen so it's just nice that we're actually addressing this in a way that's constructive and intelligent and that we've brought somebody on like yourself with this knowledge and these resources i do have a question for you i've asked this among my own groups and cohorts and i'm kind of i have my own hypothesis when did you see this shift start to happen when did we start to see that people can associate the declaration of independence with the emergence of white supremacy i myself am struggling to figure out when did that moment when did that shift and how we view america start to happen and more importantly when did it start to bubble up into our actual curriculum in our schools and the practices wow uh mr terrell that's a that's a great question i mean to some degree this has been bubbling up for a very long time um you know there's ideology out there like critical race theory there you know there have been a number of authors over the last decades who have tried to frame america as uh inherently racist from the inception even before the declaration of independence i mean the new york times 1619 project says that 1619 is the actual true founding of the country and it was a slaveocracy not a democracy so this this sort of sentiment has been out there but in the past i think honestly it's actually been defeated i think it's been defeated by the general recognition that the country certainly has not been at all perfect in living up to the ideals but it's actually the embrace of the ideals that allow us to keep moving towards them so i think it's been defeated in the past but i think over the last couple of years an intensity perhaps related to the response to president trump obviously the incidents of last year related to george floyd maybe the inequities related to covid but suddenly it's just taken on a vengeance and i can tell you having the vantage point of being involved in a number of initiatives across the country you know what you're what it seems like you're the discussion that you're engaging in in new hampshire is happening all over the country and for some it's a genuine it's a genuine interest in uh dealing with not only racial disparities but the the lack of upward mobility for people of all races i mean to some degree what we're trying to make aware is that we need to build a multi-racial coalition of people who feel that they don't have an opportunity to access the american dream that could be a white kid in appalachia you know a hispanic kid in the barrio a black kid in the south bronx i mean many of the issues same issues connect those three sets of people much more so than their race and so i think now is the time for many of us as you just said it's a sort of a fresh drink of water it's time for many of us to stand up and say look we're against racism we're against uh you know entrenched poverty but we don't want to solve the problem by literally dividing us up by race and ascribing oppressor characteristics to one group of people and oppressed characteristics to another because in some ways that actually reinforces the very divisions that we're seeking to eliminate i appreciate that um it's just great hearing about this project learning more about is definitely going to be of interest to me i'm born and raised in new orleans louisiana my family's from new orleans for quite a long time i'm a product of the new orleans school system and i'm just proud of my heritage i'm proud of being an american and it's just like i said very refreshing to hear that we're kind of counterbalancing some of the narratives that are out there because those narratives are very popular and the thing for me that i'm always striving towards and what alarms me a little bit is that i find that it's really my generation those millennials and younger that are really being confused about what historical value things have and in fact quite ignorant a lot of our historic our history as a nation our historical documents context around these certain issues so this is just really exciting to hear that we have something like this that's addressing these problems because i really do see it as the movement forward so thank you very much for your time really looking forward to learning more about this and yourself as well no thank you and i'll share very one way one very quick story yesterday a professor at stanford university asked me to present to his glass class of ninth graders because he was so desperate for his younger millennials to just have some different point of view and as we were talking about issues of race i brought up something called the rosenwald schools as an example of black resilience and and i'm not sure if folks on this panel know about the rosenwald schools uh but as an example of uh black resilience in the in the midst of terrible segregation and none of the students had any idea um and i said to them well about a hundred years ago booker t washington in the midst of jim crow segregation said we can build a network of amazing schools even if they're segregated and so he partnered with julius rosenwald who at the time was the ceo of sears so imagine the equivalent of the ceo of walmart today they built 5 000 schools throughout the south exclusively for black children the literacy rates were astronomically high and it was an unbelievable story of even under adverse conditions what our community was able to achieve and yet none of these students at one of the best colleges in the country had any idea and so i do think this is an opportunity to not say there's no issue here but let's tell the true story of our country a true and complete story

the last thing i'll say is i highly recommend anybody who hasn't read it up from slavery booker t washington is like a holy grail for me it's one of the first actual books i read from front to back so i would highly recommend anybody that's listening to this meeting to just take up more research about booker t washington that's a figure that a lot of people don't actually know that much about so just again i i could go on and on about how happy it makes me to hear this information so i won't steal the stage too much i see that rich has his hand up but i appreciate frank for bringing him on me and frank had the opportunity to um to talk to a few students in a school district out here into the the pandemic about these types of issues and we were met with some interesting just comments and kind of ways that they confronted with us so this is definitely happening in new hampshire so again it's just very exciting that we have a plan around how to counterbalance thank you very much thank you

i think drew's calling on me but he's muted but i just want to briefly say uh how much i appreciate your presentation i also want to say i would love to have you back and hear more about 1776 unite as we're facing some of the programs that the commissioner outlined i don't think it's enough to just say no to these kinds of divisive programs we have to we have to um have an alternative and it sounds like 1776 unite um has an alternative in mind and so it would be it would be um it would be welcome to hear more about the k-12 program um so we have that and so people can hear about it in the state of new hampshire on through the state board um i teach constitutional law at vermont law school we've recently been discussed discussing heart of atlanta motel and and katzenbach in different important cases i mean i just want to say um another thing i there's so many ways to celebrate uh the resiliency of black americans you mentioned uh booker t washington school programs another one that we were talking about in class the other day is the green book which is an amazing tale of resiliency to allow people to travel freely in this country and again many students were not aware of it um so again um uh celebrating the struggle but recognizing that we have made headway even if there's work to do is so important so thank you very much for being here no thank you and and uh and to your point about having a compelling alternative i've i've actually sat now with many teachers and and watched webinars of teachers who are implementing the new york times 1619 project in their schools they're not bad people you know it's just they were they felt they didn't have enough resources about the african-american experience in the united states and they thought that 1619 project was the only you know the only game in town and so we said okay you know what let's not just uh rail against this and say it's bad let's say look we there is an issue here we should tell a more expansive story but let's tell it all not let's not cherry pick so you get this impression that america is just this fatally fatalistic oppressive country and ignore all the stories again of black resilience and excellence and so we've now had more than 8 000 downloads in all 50 states of our 1776 unites curriculum and right now it's even it's just at the high school level we haven't even released the elementary and middle um school years yet so there is a deep yearning for this kind of information and rather than and rather than penalize it let's say got it let's give you something that tells a more complete story that doesn't hide from the legacy of slavery but tells how we as a country uniquely by the way uniquely in the world emerge from slavery to create new kinds of freedoms that didn't exist elsewhere all right thank you so much ian anyone else um and go ahead and then phil mr rowe i i have no words to match anyone's words except just give you a big giant thank you long long long and in coming and um can't wait for new hampshire to dive in

thank you thank you i mean i just have to say i mean i just have to say thank you all for everything that you do every day sometimes um working on issues voluntarily state board of education local school board sometimes it's a thankless job and you can't make everyone happy that's for sure but i do think this this is an opportunity to stand strong on some founding principles and be proud um and i know there are a lot of forces against it right now trying to create distraction but we've created something very special in our country that's endured for a long time and we should be simultaneously horrified by aspects of our history while also celebrating the victories that have achieved and what we still have yet to achieve together

thank you um phil did you have a question or comment yeah just ian thank you so much for being here i think you you noted something that i think is really important as well that these are not ill-intentioned individuals potentially that are coming up with questions like like the commissioner brought forward these are there's a dominant narrative around these topics right now as opposed to a diversity of thought and dialogue and i'm just wondering how we as the board help reinforce a diversity of dialogue that includes like the points that resonate very strongly with me that you brought up uh and that might be more of a commissioner and a board question but i feel like we have an obligation to the students of the state to ensure that um they're exposed to the diversity of thought on this as opposed to just a monolithic dominant narrative no i mean our country thrives on viewpoint diversity i mean oftentimes we hear the word diversity there's just an assumption the prefix is race it's like there are a lot of different forms of of diversity and viewpoint is probably the most important i mean the first thing i'd suggest in this process of having diversity of ideas is not to chunk ourselves up by race from the outset and to ascribe that the the the people behind the whites only sign are all the oppressed and the people behind the bypass signs are all i'm sorry the sorry the whites are the oppressors and the other room is the oppressed because i mean it sounds terrible this is what's happening in some places across the country and so you you have this starting point where people are put into a room and they have to confess their oppressive tendency as as a starting point in the conversation how is that productive for anyone and if you're on the other side i mean there are things that are now called privilege walks and if you're familiar with these there might be some schools that are doing it in new hampshire as part of professional development training or even doing it with students where all the people will line up on a given line and basically the instructor will say take one step forward or one step backwards based on the question and usually it starts off so imagine everyone's on a line and says if you're white take one step forward if you're black or person of color takes two steps backward literally so imagine at the end so you you're clearly in the the oppressed category if now at the end you're you know you're a few steps uh behind and you just think how it sounds crazy but this is the manifestation of the ideology so i i'd strongly uh propose that to get to where you want to go let's treat each other as human beings first um and frankly if that's our starting point there's a lot more trust that can be built and built in every subsequent part of the process

sally do i have a question thank you thank you so much ian is very inspiring and um and that's what that's what this country needs is what our state needs it's what the world needs actually but i have a question for commissioner is it the idea that new hampshire will incorporate the 1776 curriculum united curriculum or bureau tech academies curriculum or where do we go from here

thank you for that question and actually i'll even let ian weigh in on that so as you know uh your curriculum is the domain of local school districts so my intention today really is to start a conversation uh around this topic because because i think it's important because i see some of the development of some of these issues in our local districts and i think that this is an appropriate place to start that conversation at the state board of education and so that's really where we begin i agree uh with uh rich sala as well though that it would be valuable to get further information on this those don't have to be mutually exclusive in terms of our domain and as we and i really think as we and everyone as we further educate ourselves about these issues and you know understand the importance of viewpoint diversity uh that we can be more effective as a state in making sure that we serve uh you know all of our families well and that we bring all of our students to what i often refer to as those bright futures um i'm gonna and i'll let ian comment on that if he wants to as well yeah i think it's a good question when when we built the uh and yeah we're in the process of growing it but we built the 1776 unites curriculum we recognize that the vast majority of the country is as new hampshire that the state does not dictate curricula it has to be done at the at the local level in adherence to some state and national standards um and so what's interesting uh about what we're learning though about it's been downloaded more than 8 000 times in all 50 states and the the ways in which it's being utilized is just wonderful so teachers are using it as supplemental materials in social studies classes it's also being used in after school settings it's being used in prison ministries it's used being used by parents as part of a homeschool curriculum so what we've really come to believe is that we've created this resource that can be used wherever character formation is happening for kids and so we we we we're offering it up not as you must use this or you must use it in its entirety and as a you know we're we're going to design it as a full curriculum but it's not our goal for a state to mandate it because let a thousand flowers bloom in the extent that we think we've created something very special um but it's not our role to try and dictate that to a to a state board of education for sure yeah and sally just to clarify uh this was this presentation is really for informational purposes for the people to understand um where things are and and that some of these changes are are coming to new hampshire and to get a presentation about um about some of these issues and it's purely informational we're not yeah we have nothing to act on we have no proposals we're not we're not trying to um move forward with any any thing here it's just an informational let us know what's going on yeah noah it was really in terms of where do we go in terms of further investigating you know at what level um but ian i think that there's so many opportunities to to reach out from the social point of view with all the boys and girls clubs big brother big sisters organizations absolutely absolutely all right kate did you have your hand up hi ann um i have a question you had said that you have uh the curriculum is for high school only for now it ultimately will k through 12. because i really feel it's really important to educate when they're young and bringing them up not just in the high school high school they're kind of they're right now they're being manipulated and you know uh not manipulated but not um not getting the correct how am i supposed to say this um you know they've already had their personal thoughts and i think starting at a younger age it's a lot easier more informative you know we we agree uh we started off in high school we again our plan is that it's k-12 again this is all philanthropically funded so it would be available for free at the elementary school level we're creating this character ben 1776 he's an animated a 10 year old a black boy who was a slave back in the mid 1750s and he's an inventor he's just an inventive kid and he invents a time machine and the time machine allows him to travel back and forth so he can meet some of the other characters that we find in the curriculum to to so that basically young kids can experience these amazing figures and ask questions that are developmentally appropriate that would more connect uh with younger kids so that's coming so that's that's going to be part of the curriculum as well i think that's very important starting at the young age very fun thank you yeah

all right well thank you ian uh that was very informative we appreciate your time and um maybe we'll have you back thank you so much ian thank you very much okay thank