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, spurring her to create a small education nonprofit to support their success.

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.

Read the full article about the National Education Equity Lab by Tamara Straus at AP News.