Schooling is the civil rights problem of our time. That’s what Leslie Cornfeld determined after a decade advising New York Metropolis Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama’s two schooling secretaries — and seeing how few low-income college students went to the colleges that result in high-paying jobs.
Cornfeld mentioned she spent a part of her time within the Obama administration visiting the nation’s Title I excessive faculties, these with a excessive proportion of low-income college students. She recalled: “We heard the identical themes time and again from principals, district leaders and college students. That even probably the most gifted, hard-working students — in rural communities, poor city communities, Native American communities — can not get on the radar of extra selective universities.”
And even when they may get on their radar, college students didn’t imagine that they had been college-ready or college-worthy, Cornfeld mentioned. In the meantime, when she and her Washington colleagues met with greater schooling leaders, they repeatedly claimed, “We want that we might discover gifted decrease revenue students however we simply can’t discover them.”
For Cornfeld, this made no sense, since universities appeared to have had no bother discovering the perfect athletes, usually from low-income backgrounds, to play on their groups. Why couldn’t they discover the perfect low-income college students to fill their school rooms?
In 2019, with $50,000 in startup funding from the Carnegie Company of New York, she launched the Nationwide Schooling Fairness Lab, a nonprofit “based on the idea that expertise is evenly distributed however alternative shouldn’t be.”
Cornfeld additionally was knowledgeable by a 2017 analysis of greater than 30 million school college students, led by economist Raj Chetty, which confirmed that probably the most selective faculties within the U.S., enabling the best profession alternatives and incomes, had been the least socioeconomically numerous.
Cornfeld determined to attach the dots and convey elite universities into non-elite faculties. By fall 2019, with a employees of three, the Lab was delivering Harvard School poetry class to 2 dozen excessive faculties. The Lab concurrently developed a spread of helps: connecting professors with college students by Zoom; coaching highschool lecturers as course co-teachers; and hiring school undergraduates as course educating fellows and mentors in making use of to and navigating school.
Over the previous 5 years, the Fairness Lab, now known as the Nationwide Schooling Alternative Community, or NEON, reports it has introduced 60 school credit-bearing programs from 17 universities to greater than 40,000 highschool college students in 33 states — with 80 p.c of scholars passing the programs. NEON is presently in each Title I college in Jackson, Mississippi, 120 Title I faculties in New York Metropolis and has plans to matriculate 1 million Title I excessive faculties into on-line school programs inside a decade.
Ought to NEON’s aim be achieved, it could surpass the variety of low-income college students annually taking Advanced Placement tests. Sixty p.c of A.P. exams taken by low-income college students in 2023 scored too low for faculty credit score, a statistic that has not budged in 20 years, in response to reporting from the New York Times.
“We’re a really completely different animal than A.P.,” Cornfeld mentioned. “We’re serving low-income, underresourced students and this mannequin was developed for them. We’re bringing faculties into the colleges and altering the tradition.”
Though the Nationwide Schooling Alternative Community has giant ambitions, it stays small in two important methods. The nonprofit has solely 32 full-time employees, and its annual income in 2024 was simply $7.5 million.
Carnegie has supplied NEON two extra grants — $200,000 in 2021 and $3 million this yr. And over the previous six years, NEON has attracted funds from the Invoice & Melinda Gates, NBA, Apollo and Morgan Stanley foundations, amongst others.
“That gave them the flexibility to essentially begin influencing hundreds of scholars with comparatively restricted sources,” McCance mentioned.
Whereas some large-scale personal interventions — like Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million investment in Newark public schools and the Gates Basis’s $1 billion Small Schools Initiative — have stumbled, McCance famous that NEON has fared higher by beginning small and proving its mannequin.
“Then they may go to different universities, different college districts and present them the success that they had within the final yr and construct on it,” he mentioned.
NEON’s mannequin shouldn’t be with out hurdles. Celeste Pico, principal of Lompoc Excessive College in California determined to introduce two NEON programs to extend college-prep choices after the pandemic.
More and more, NEON learners are coming into school having completed one yr of university-level programs, Pico mentioned. In 2024-’25, Lompoc provided six NEON programs, eliminating a number of A.P. courses, partly as a result of the A.P. grade is predicated on just one check.
Adrienne Battle, superintendent of the Metro Nashville Public Colleges in Tennessee, has additionally scaled up NEON programs in her district.
“We’ve obtained fairly a excessive positive-response charge and requests from not solely our college groups but in addition from our college students and fogeys,” she mentioned, including that she plans to broaden NEON choices in “all 12 of my zoned excessive faculties.”
Marah Rigaud is a first-generation Haitian American who took 5 NEON programs at her highschool in Lengthy Island, N.Y., and now attends Yale.
“Listening to these large names like Yale, Harvard, Georgetown can seem intimidating at first,” she mentioned. “And while you don’t have that have, you type of really feel a bit behind and considering that school is a few type of unimaginable feat. These programs offer you a basis.”
Rigaud is among the greater than 10,000 college students whose post-secondary outcomes NEON is monitoring by way of a research by Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins. After 5 years of data analysis, Balfanz discovered that NEON college students who cross a course are twice as more likely to attend four-year faculties than college students from comparable excessive faculties — and likewise persist in school at greater charges.
Can the Nationwide Schooling Alternative Community attain its aim of serving 1 million college students inside 10 years?
Cornfeld thinks so as a result of demand for NEON programs is “greater than ever,” she mentioned, with greater than 35 new districts reaching out to hitch the community.
McCance, the Lab’s largest particular person funder, mentioned, “I’ve by no means really considered whether or not the aim is exactly achievable or not,” however “one hurdle, fairly frankly, is capital.”
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Tamara Straus is senior editor on the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the place you possibly can learn the full article. This text was supplied to The Related Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as a part of a partnership to cowl philanthropy and nonprofits supported by the Lilly Endowment. The Chronicle is solely chargeable for the content material. For all of AP’s philanthropy protection, go to https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
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