Ian Rowe

Ian Rowe is a senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. A proud product of the New York City public school system, Ian Rowe is a social entrepreneur and leader who has worked for more than 20 years in the public, private and nonprofit sectors, to effect positive change in the lives of young people worldwide. As CEO of Public Prep, he provides the strategic direction for the network of single-sex elementary and middle public schools that are determined to put their students on a path to college completion. Prior to Public Prep, Ian was the deputy director of postsecondary success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where he worked to increase college completion rates among low-income young adults. Prior to working at Gates, Ian worked for MTV as the senior vice president of strategic partnerships & public affairs. There he helped develop global and domestic campaigns, such as “Get Schooled," which used the power of media and popular culture to motivate young people to graduate from high school and go to and succeed in college, and "Choose or Lose," which helped mobilize more than 20 million young people to vote in Presidential elections. Prior to working at MTV, Ian worked as the director of strategy and performance measurement at The White House USA Freedom Corps office which formed after September 11th to encourage every American to make a lifetime commitment in service of others. Ian was also part of Teach For America in its early days, where he helped develop a comprehensive portfolio model of assessment that measured teacher effectiveness as a function of gains in student achievement. Ian graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. He received his BS in computer science engineering from Cornell University and MBA from Harvard Business School. He is an Echoing Green Fellow and a Harvard Initiative for Social Enterprise Fellow. Ian is a member of the Board of Advisors for the a.i.r. NYC Asthma Initiative; a founding Board member of the NYC Special Education Collaborative; a current member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Visiting Committee; a founding Board member of Malaria No More and was the first black Editor-in-Chief of the Harbus, the Harvard Business School newspaper.