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Education is the civil rights issue of our time. Leslie Kornfeld made the decision after spending a decade advising New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama’s two education secretaries — and watching how few low-income students went to universities where they got higher-paying jobs.
Kornfeld said he spent some of his time in the Obama administration visiting the country’s Title I high schools, which had high percentages of low-income students. He recalled: “We heard the same themes over and over again from principals, district leaders, and students. Even the most talented, hard-working scholars – in rural communities, poor urban communities, Native American communities – may not get on the radar of more selective universities.”
And even if they might get on their radar, students didn’t believe they were ready for college or eligible for college, Kornfeld said. Meanwhile, when he and his Washington colleagues met with higher education leaders, he repeatedly claimed, “We wish we could find talented low-income scholars but we can’t find them.”
To Kornfeld, this made no sense, as universities had no trouble finding the best athletes, often from low-income backgrounds, to play on their teams. Why couldn’t they find the best low-income students to fill their classes?
In 2019, with $50,000 in startup funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, she launched the National Education Equity Lab, a nonprofit “founded on the belief that talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not.”
Cornfield was also informed by a 2017 analysis A survey of more than 30 million college students led by economist Raj Chetty revealed that the most selective colleges in the US, which enable the highest career opportunities and income, were the least socioeconomically diverse.
Kornfeld decided to connect the dots and bring elite universities to non-elite schools. By the end of 2019, with a staff of three, the Lab was offering a Harvard College poetry class in two dozen high schools. The Lab simultaneously developed a series of supports: connecting professors with students via Zoom; training high school teachers as curriculum co-teachers; and employing college graduate students as course teaching fellows and advisors to apply and advance to college.
Over the past five years, the Equity Lab, now called the National Education Opportunity Network, or NEON, reports It has brought 60 college credit-bearing courses from 17 universities to more than 40,000 high school students in 33 states – with 80 percent of students passing the courses. NEON is currently in every Title I school in Jackson, Mississippi, 120 Title I schools in New York City and plans to matriculate 1 million Title I high schools into online college courses within a decade.
If NEON’s goal is achieved, it will exceed the number of low-income students Taking Advanced Placement tests annuallySixty percent of AP exams taken by low-income students in 2023 scored too low to qualify for college credit, a statistic that has not decreased in 20 years, according to Reporting from The New York Times,
“We’re a very different animal from the AP,” Kornfeld said. “We are serving low-income, under-resourced scholars and this model was developed for them. We are bringing colleges into schools and changing the culture.”
Although the National Education Opportunities Network has big ambitions, it falls short in two important ways. The nonprofit has only 32 full-time employees, and its annual revenue in 2024 was only $7.5 million.
Carnegie has awarded NEON two more grants – $200,000 in 2021 and $3 million this year. And over the past six years, NEON attracted money From Bill & Melinda Gates, the NBA, Apollo, and the Morgan Stanley Foundation, among others.
The lab has also received support from individuals. The biggest philanthropist among them is venture capitalist Henry McCance.
“My VC background is focused on supporting the best people,” McCance said, citing Kornfeld’s background as a federal civil rights prosecutor. McCance was also impressed by NEON’s model, which links existing, paid college courses in high schools to existing, paid government employees.
“It gave them the ability to really impact thousands of students with relatively limited resources,” McCance said.
While some large-scale private interventions – such as Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million investment in Newark Public Schools and the Gates Foundation $1 billion small school initiative – have faltered, McCance said NEON has done better by starting small and proving its model.
“Then they can go to other universities, other school districts and show them the success they’ve had over the past year and build on that,” he said.
NEON’s model is not without obstacles. Celeste Pico, principal of Lompoc High School in California, decided to launch two NEON courses to expand college-prep offerings after the pandemic.
“We’d be lying to you if we told you it didn’t take long,” Pico said. “But we knew it was in the best interest of our students, because it does more than just provide access to those classes – it helps close the gap economically for many of our students.”
Increasingly, NEON learners are entering college after completing a year of university-level courses, Pico said. In 2024-’25, Lompoc offered six NEON courses, eliminating many AP classes, as AP grades are based on only one test.
Adrienne Battle, superintendent of Metro Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee, has also expanded NEON courses in her district.
“We have received a very high positive-response rate and requests not only from our school teams but also from our students and parents,” she said, adding that she plans to expand the NEON offering to “all 12 of my zoned high schools.”
Mara Rigaud is a first-generation Haitian American who took five NEON courses at her high school in Long Island, NY and now attends Yale.
“Hearing big names like Yale, Harvard, Georgetown can seem intimidating at first,” he said. “And when you don’t have that experience, you feel a little behind and think college is kind of an impossible feat. These courses give you a foundation.”
Rigaud is one of more than 10,000 students whose post-secondary outcomes NEON is tracking through a study by Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins. five years later data analysisBalfanz found that NEON students who pass a course are twice as likely to attend four-year colleges as students from similar high schools – and also persist in college at higher rates.
Can the National Education Opportunity Network reach its target of serving 10 lakh students within 10 years?
Kornfeld thinks this is because demand for NEON courses is “higher than ever,” he said, with more than 35 new districts reaching out to join the network.
McCance, the lab’s largest individual funder, said, “I’ve never really thought about whether the goal is really achievable,” but “one barrier, obviously, is capital.”
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Tamara Strauss is a senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where you can read full articleThis article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as part of a partnership to cover philanthropy and nonprofits supported by the Lilly Endowment. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. For all our philanthropy coverage, visit /hub/philanthropy,
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