After billions in failed big bets, funders and schools are turning to this small education nonprofit

Education is the civil rights issue of our time. That’s what Leslie Cornfeld decided after a decade advising New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama’s two education secretaries — and seeing how few low-income students went to the universities that lead to high-paying jobs.

Cornfeld said she spent part of her time in the Obama administration visiting the nation’s Title I high schools, those with a high percentage of low-income students. She recalled: “We heard the same themes over and over again from principals, district leaders and students. That even the most talented, hard-working scholars — in rural communities, poor urban communities, Native American communities — cannot get on the radar of more selective universities.”

And even if they could get on their radar, students did not believe that they were college-ready or college-worthy, Cornfeld said. Meanwhile, when she and her Washington colleagues met with higher education leaders, they repeatedly claimed, “We wish that we could find talented lower income scholars but we just can’t find them.”

For Cornfeld, this made no sense, since universities seemed to have had no trouble finding the very best athletes, often from low-income backgrounds, to play on their teams. Why couldn’t they find the very best low-income students to fill their classrooms?

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 evenly distributed but opportunity is not.”

Cornfeld also was informed by a 2017 analysis of more than 30 million college students, led by economist Raj Chetty, which showed that the most selective colleges in the U.S., enabling the highest career opportunities and incomes, were the least socioeconomically diverse.

Cornfeld decided to connect the dots and bring elite universities into non-elite schools. By fall 2019, with a staff of three, the Lab was delivering Harvard College poetry class to two dozen high schools. The Lab simultaneously developed a range of supports: connecting professors with students by Zoom; training high school teachers as course co-teachers; and hiring college undergraduates as course teaching fellows and mentors in applying to and navigating 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 has plans to matriculate 1 million Title I high schools into online college courses within a decade.

Should NEON’s goal be achieved, it would surpass the number of low-income students annually taking Advanced Placement tests. Sixty percent of A.P. exams taken by low-income students in 2023 scored too low for college credit, a statistic that has not budged in 20 years, according to reporting from the New York Times.

“We are a very different animal than A.P.,” Cornfeld said. “We are serving low-income, underresourced scholars and this model was developed for them. We are bringing colleges into the schools and changing the culture.”

A lean nonprofit

Although the National Education Opportunity Network has large ambitions, it remains small in two significant ways. The nonprofit has only 32 full-time staff, and its annual revenue in 2024 was just $7.5 million.

Carnegie has provided NEON two more grants — $200,000 in 2021 and $3 million this year. And over the past six years, NEON has attracted funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates, NBA, Apollo and Morgan Stanley foundations, among others.

The Lab also has attracted support from individuals. The biggest benefactor among them is venture capitalist Henry McCance.

“My VC background very much focuses on backing the best people,” McCance said, noting Cornfeld’s background as a federal civil rights prosecutor. McCance was also impressed by the NEON’s model, which connects existing, paid-for college courses with existing, paid-for government employees at high schools.

“That gave them the ability to really start influencing thousands of students with relatively limited resources,” McCance said.

While some large-scale private interventions — like Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million investment in Newark public schools and the Gates Foundation’s $1 billion Small Schools Initiative — have stumbled, McCance noted that NEON has fared better by starting small and proving its model.

“Then they could go to other universities, other school districts and show them the success they had in the last year and build on it,” he said.

512 high schools and counting

NEON’s model is not without hurdles. Celeste Pico, principal of Lompoc High School in California decided to introduce two NEON courses to increase college-prep offerings after the pandemic.

“We’d be lying to you if we told you this has not taken a lot of time,” Pico said. “But we knew it was in the best interest of our students, because it’s more than having access to those classes — it’s helped close the gap for a lot of our students financially.”

Increasingly, NEON learners are entering college having finished one year of university-level courses, Pico said. In 2024-’25, Lompoc offered six NEON courses, eliminating several A.P. classes, in part because the A.P. grade is based on only one test.

Adrienne Battle, superintendent of the Metro Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee, has also scaled up NEON courses in her district.

“We’ve received quite a high positive-response rate and requests from not only our school teams but also from our students and parents,” she said, adding that she plans to expand NEON offerings in “all 12 of my zoned high schools.”

Closing the confidence gap

Marah Rigaud is a first-generation Haitian American who took five NEON courses at her high school in Long Island, N.Y., and now attends Yale.

“Hearing these big names like Yale, Harvard, Georgetown can appear intimidating at first,” she said. “And when you don’t have that experience, you kind of feel a bit behind and thinking that college is some kind of impossible feat. These courses give you a foundation.”

Rigaud is one of the more than 10,000 students whose post-secondary outcomes NEON is tracking through a study by Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins. After five years of data analysis, Balfanz found that NEON students who pass a course are twice as likely to attend four-year colleges than students from similar high schools — and also persist in college at higher rates.

Can the National Education Opportunity Network reach its goal of serving 1 million students within 10 years?

Cornfeld thinks so because demand for NEON courses is “higher than ever,” she said, with more than 35 new districts reaching out to join the network.