Overview:
A small nonprofit, as soon as launched with simply $50,000, has now reached over 40,000 low-income highschool college students with college-level programs — and goals to succeed in 1 million. Among the many beneficiaries is Haitian American pupil Marah Rigaud, now at Yale, who says this system helped her consider faculty was inside attain.
By TAMARA STRAUS of The Chronicle of Philanthropy Chronicle of Philanthropy | Extra enhancing by The Haitian Instances.
Marah Rigaud is a first-generation Haitian American who took 5 programs from the Fairness Lab, now known as the Nationwide Schooling Alternative Community, or NEON, at her highschool in Lengthy Island, N.Y., and now attends Yale.
“Listening to these massive names like Yale, Harvard, Georgetown can seem intimidating at first,” she stated.
“And once you don’t have that have, you form of really feel a bit behind and pondering that faculty is a few form of unattainable feat. These programs offer you a basis.”
Rigaud is likely one of the greater than 10,000 college students whose post-secondary outcomes NEON is monitoring via a examine by Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins. After 5 years of data analysis, Balfanz discovered that NEON college students who go a course are twice as prone to attend four-year faculties as college students from comparable excessive colleges — and likewise persist in faculty at greater charges.
Over the previous 5 years, NEON reports it has introduced 60 faculty credit-bearing programs from 17 universities to greater than 40,000 highschool college students in 33 states, with 80 % of scholars passing the programs.
NEON is presently in each Title I college in Jackson, Mississippi, and 120 Title I colleges in New York Metropolis. It has plans to matriculate 1 million Title I highschool college students into on-line faculty programs inside a decade.
Ought to NEON’s purpose be achieved, it will surpass the variety of low-income college students annually taking Advanced Placement tests. Sixty % 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 keeping with reporting from the New York Times.
“We’re a really completely different animal than A.P.,” Leslie Cornfeld, Neon’s founder and director, stated. “We’re serving low-income, under-resourced students and this mannequin was developed for them. We’re bringing faculties into the faculties and altering the tradition.”
Schooling is the civil rights difficulty of our time. That’s what 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 stated she spent a part of her time within the Obama administration visiting the nation’s Title I excessive colleges, these with a excessive share of low-income college students.
She recalled: “We heard the identical themes time and again from principals, district leaders and college students. That even essentially the most gifted, hard-working students — in rural communities, poor city communities, Native American communities — can’t get on the radar of extra selective universities.”
And even when they might get on their radar, college students didn’t consider that they have been college-ready or college-worthy, Cornfeld stated. In the meantime, when she and her Washington colleagues met with greater schooling leaders, they repeatedly claimed, “We want that we might discover gifted lower-income students, however we simply can’t discover them.”
For Cornfeld, this made no sense, since universities appeared to have had no hassle discovering the easiest athletes, typically from low-income backgrounds, to play on their groups. Why couldn’t they discover the easiest 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 assumption that expertise is evenly distributed however alternative just isn’t.”
Cornfeld was additionally knowledgeable by a 2017 analysis of greater than 30 million faculty college students, led by economist Raj Chetty, which confirmed that essentially the most selective faculties within the U.S., enabling the very best profession alternatives and incomes, have been the least socioeconomically various.
Cornfeld determined to attach the dots and convey elite universities into non-elite colleges. By fall 2019, with a workers of three, the Lab was delivering a Harvard School poetry class to 2 dozen excessive colleges.
The Lab concurrently developed a spread of helps: connecting professors with college students by Zoom; coaching highschool academics as course co-teachers; and hiring faculty undergraduates as course educating fellows and mentors in making use of to and navigating faculty.
A lean nonprofit
Though the Nationwide Schooling Alternative Community has giant ambitions, it stays small in two vital methods. The nonprofit has solely 32 full-time workers, and its annual income in 2024 was simply $7.5 million.
Carnegie has offered NEON with two extra grants — $200,000 in 2021 and $3 million this 12 months. And over the previous six years, NEON has attracted funds from the Invoice & Melinda Gates, NBA, Apollo and Morgan Stanley foundations, amongst others.
The Lab has additionally attracted help from people. The largest benefactor amongst them is enterprise capitalist Henry McCance.
“My VC background very a lot focuses on backing the very best folks,” McCance stated, noting Cornfeld’s background as a federal civil rights prosecutor. McCance was additionally impressed by the NEON’s mannequin, which connects current, paid-for faculty programs with current, paid-for authorities staff at excessive colleges.
“That gave them the power to essentially begin influencing 1000’s of scholars with comparatively restricted assets,” McCance stated.
Whereas some large-scale non-public 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 might go to different universities, different college districts and present them the success that they had within the final 12 months and construct on it,” he stated.
512 excessive colleges and counting
NEON’s mannequin just isn’t with out hurdles. Celeste Pico, principal of Lompoc Excessive Faculty in California, determined to introduce two NEON programs to extend college-prep choices after the pandemic.
“We’d be mendacity to you if we instructed you this has not taken numerous time,” Pico stated. “However we knew it was in the very best curiosity of our college students, as a result of it’s greater than accessing these lessons — it’s helped shut the hole for lots of our college students financially.”
More and more, NEON learners are getting into faculty having completed one 12 months of university-level programs, Pico stated. In 2024-’25, Lompoc supplied six NEON programs, eliminating a number of A.P. lessons, partly as a result of the A.P. grade relies on just one take a look at.
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 fee and requests from not solely our college groups but in addition from our college students and oldsters,” she stated, including that she plans to broaden NEON choices in “all 12 of my zoned excessive colleges.”
Can the Nationwide Schooling Alternative Community attain its purpose 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 stated, with greater than 35 new districts reaching out to hitch the community.
McCance, the Lab’s greatest particular person funder, stated, “I’ve by no means truly considered whether or not the purpose is exactly achievable or not,” however “one hurdle, fairly frankly, is capital.”