Better Schools, Better Citizens, Better Cities
Coolidge 2025 Winter Gala
Keynote Speaker: Ian Rowe
Coolidge Award for Enterprise Inaugural Honorees:
Michael and Olga Block
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Union League Club of New York
“Education must give not only power but direction.”
—Calvin Coolidge, Amherst College Commencement, 1919
Coolidge Gala Keynote Speaker Ian Rowe
Cofounder, Vertex Partnership Academies
Author, Agency
The younger the American, the more likely he is to approve of socialism.
Younger voters seem unaware of the hundreds of millions who have lost their lives under socialist or communist regimes. They are missing a basic understanding of what free enterprise gives our nation. And a recognition of the importance of individual responsibility. Such ignorance is beginning to take entire cities hostage. The biases of younger voters hurt states, and even our federal government, as well.
This gap is not the students’ fault. Our universities fail us, as many have pointed out. Less discussed has been the fact that schools, even primary schools, fail pupils more fundamentally.
These days schools impart false notions of both history and citizenship. From kindergarten through high school, they train young citizens into a culture of dependence, not freedom or enterprise.
Yet engaged as they are in the political fray, few leaders halt to consider the direct connection between bad schools and election outcomes. This, despite the fact that the stakes could not be higher. For, as Calvin Coolidge warned at another moment of national turmoil, the year 1919, “if society lacks learning and virtue, it perishes.”
One leader who is devoting his life to civic education is Ian Rowe, the Coolidge Foundation’s 2025 Winter Gala keynote speaker.
Join the Foundation for an inspiring evening at which Mr. Rowe will lay out a plan for restoring our schools and sustaining our republic.
tuesday, December 9, 2025
6:00 p.m. Reception
7:00 p.m. Dinner
Union League Club
38 East 37th Street | New York City
Cocktail Attire
Ticket and SponsorShip Opportunities
School Founder | $25,000: Table of 10; Full-Page Ad
Mayor | $15,000: Table of 10; Half-Page Ad
Principal | $1,600: Single Ticket
Creative Disruptor | $500: Single Ticket, Under 35 Years Old
Questions? Contact Colleen Stamos at
cstamos@coolidgefoundation.org or
917-231-4668
About Ian Rowe,
Keynote Speaker
Ian Rowe is the cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a network of virtues-based International Baccalaureate high schools inaugurated in the Bronx in 2022. He previously spent a decade as 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 served as deputy director of postsecondary success at the Gates Foundation and director of strategy and performance measurement at the USA Freedom Corps office in the White House.
Mr. Rowe is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on education and upward mobility, family formation, and adoption. He serves as chairman of the board of Spence-Chapin, a nonprofit adoption services organization, and he cofounded of the National Summer School Initiative. He is the author of Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power (Templeton Press, 2022).
Mr. Rowe holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was the first black editor-in-chief of the Harbus, and a BS in computer science engineering from Cornell University.
About Michael and Olga Block,
Inaugural Honorees,
Coolidge Award for Enterprise
President Coolidge understood that entrepreneurs drive America forward.
The Coolidge Foundation has established the Coolidge Award for Enterprise to remind the nation that enterprise deserves our unqualified approval and support.
The inaugural honorees are Michael and Olga Block, founders of BASIS schools. Their entrepreneurial approach enabled them to set a new standard for American education.
The Blocks, both economists, encountered a glaring disparity: Although Americans often declared themselves satisfied with their schools, the truth was that American students performed well below those of foreign nations in language and math.
The Blocks believed American children could do better. But that required giving middle and high schoolers the opportunity of a truly rigorous education.
Starting in Tucson with one charter school, the Blocks created BASIS, whose schools train for academic achievement and demand quantifiable results. Today, BASIS students number in the tens of thousands, and BASIS schools routinely appear in national rankings of best public high schools.
Please join us in honoring the first recipients of the Coolidge Award for Enterprise, Michael and Olga Block.
