I grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, raised by a single Black teenage mother. She worked long hours and still found the energy to keep me focused. She signed me up for summer academic programs. She made sure homework came before anything else. We didn’t have much, but she never let me think education was optional. For her, education was the one way forward.

Today, when I walk into a classroom at College Achieve Public Schools, where I work, I see faces that remind me of my own, both in the students and the educators teaching them. This was intentional. We realized our scholars would learn best from teachers who know their neighborhoods, understand their challenges and see their potential. So we built a system to achieve that goal. 

Our educators reflect the community we serve. More than half are people of color, with significant representation from Black, Latino, Bengali, Arabic and Asian educators. Black male teachers, a group often underrepresented nationally in education, make up roughly 20% of the faculty, an exceptionally high percentage when compared with the national average of 1%. The team is stable and growing, with a cohort of educators recently hitting the five-year mark and earning tenure. We are proud of these figures, and we know why it’s working.

Our approach is straightforward and replicable. We recruit from the community, pay people as they train, coach them well and show a clear path forward so they stay. 

We partnered with nearby St. Elizabeth and Montclair State universities to hire qualified college students as substitute teachers, pairing each with a veteran mentor. They work as subs while completing their degrees, gaining classroom experience. Once they graduate, they can earn a full teaching certificate through and return as certified teachers. 

Through grants from the New Jersey Department of Education in partnership with Rutgers University, we have helped college students earn their teacher certifications while building direct recruitment pipelines. Paraprofessionals taking part in the program can typically earn their state teaching certification in two to four years, depending on their level of experience and education when they enroll. The program targets fields that have been disproportionately impacted by staff shortages, such as special education, science, math, English as a second language and bilingual education.

Our school also works with Gateway U, a workforce development initiative offering online college degrees, and has partnered with Teach for America to recruit educators. 

We also created a summer co-teacher program in hard-to-staff subjects so aspiring educators can teach in their subject with the help of seasoned educators before working full time the following school year. This past summer, 15 college students participated, and while some have gone to complete their degrees, some have stayed on as substitute teachers at CAPS or volunteered to lead clubs or special programs like robotics. I feel confident that at least half of these students will eventually join full time.

For late-career aspiring educators already in the workforce, we built routes to finish credentials while earning credit, including online degree options and targeted certification support.

In total, our partnerships with teacher-pipeline programs helped the certification cohort grow from 18 in 2018 to 35 in 2025, a 94% increase.

Retention is built into the design. New teachers get scheduled coaching time focused on practice. We reimburse tuition in exchange for a commitment of two full school years after they complete their degree or certificate, and provide leadership development so strong teachers can grow without leaving their classrooms. Many of our school leaders began here as teachers. People stay when they feel seen, improve their craft and can picture the next step. 

Since opening in 2017, College Achieve Public Schools has grown to nearly 200 staff across its five campuses in Paterson. Retention has improved each year, culminating in 86.6% teacher retention and 92.8% overall staff retention and 88% of teachers reporting satisfaction with leadership and school environment for the 2024-25 school year.

This model of development, supported certification and long-term career support can be replicated in any school or district willing to invest in its own community as the future of its teaching force. 

Seeing take similar steps by raising salaries, removing licensing hurdles and encouraging paraprofessionals and aides to pursue teaching credentials is refreshing. These changes open the door for more people from different backgrounds to become teachers and stay in the profession.

Education is about more than academics; it can redirect the course of a child’s life, like mine. Representation matters not just for diversity’s sake, but because it is proven to make . 

A school full of teachers who reflect its community doesn’t happen by accident. It happened because we chose to invest in people. We make it easier for future teachers to see themselves in the classroom and achieve success for our students. As my mother understood, education has the power to open doors I didn’t even know existed. Now, I am proud to do the same for other teachers.

He’s right about the underrepresentation.  But ending gifted programs doesn’t fix inequity; it removes one of the few formal routes to advanced learning. Wealthier families replace it with tutoring and private schools, while low-income parents are left with fewer options. Eliminating public gifted programs doesn’t level the field; it tilts it.

Even more concerning, it narrows the very top of the nation’s talent funnel — exactly the opposite of what should be happening. True equity comes from identifying more talent earlier, broadening how it is identified and ensuring every child has a pathway into demanding coursework.

When I moved my family from Newark to Moorestown, New Jersey, an affluent suburb outside Philadelphia, I saw how wealthier school systems deliberately nurture talent. In kindergarten, children took a standardized test; the top scorers entered gifted programs in first grade. By fourth grade, they were tracked into advanced classes. It was systematic and designed to nurture academic potential.

I’ve seen that kind of cultivation in another field entirely: sports. When I was a middle school principal in Newark, one of my students was an average basketball player in sixth grade. Two years later, scouts were at our games; Dariq Whitehead went on to Duke and then the NBA. Athletics systems are relentless about finding and developing talent early. Academic systems rarely are.

At Thrive Scholars, we identify thousands of high-achieving teens from low-income backgrounds — through a national selection process that looks for exceptional academic performance and persistence — and give them the sustained help they need to excel in rigorous colleges and high-growth careers. These are remarkable young people who made it from kindergarten all the way to high school largely unnoticed. During the summers after their junior and senior years, they spend six weeks taking three hours of calculus and three hours of academic writing each day — the kind of deep preparation wealthier peers often access through private programs. Throughout college, they receive four years of one-on-one career coaching, so academic gains translate into opportunity. 

Some 95% of our scholars graduate from college, many in STEM fields; their average GPA rivals that of their wealthiest peers, and their starting salaries are roughly twice their families’ household income.

But providing academic catch-up and economic mobility, while essential, are not the same as cultivating excellence. Charters and programs like mine help more students reach and finish college, and that is progress. But it is not the same as moving more students into the most influential seats in American life. Look at , elite research labs, federal clerkships, venture capital firms and tenured STEM faculties: they still overwhelmingly come from affluent, largely white pipelines. While getting more low-income students to college is necessary, it isn’t sufficient for diversifying who leads, invents and allocates capital.

You can see the structural gap in our intake. Even exceptional scholars arrive having had uneven access to advanced math and writing. We compress years of enrichment into two pre-college summers. If gifted students were identified and nurtured earlier, far more would enter college ready to lead rather than catch up — and programs like Thrive could help them accelerate instead of remediate.

That’s why the top of the funnel matters. The fewer districts that identify and challenge high-achieving students early, the fewer promising high schoolers organizations like mine will have to work with. Some charter school networks have raised expectations for all students from the earliest grades — but many lack gifted-and-talented programs. In focusing so heavily on bringing everyone to grade level, they fail to push advanced students further. The unintended message is that low-income students of color aren’t gifted — or aren’t in ways that merit cultivation. That isn’t equity; it’s a missed opportunity.

America needs an ecosystem that does both: lift every student and accelerate the most advanced learners. I’m encouraged by newer initiatives like — which finds mathematically gifted students as early as second grade and surrounds them with advanced coursework, mentorship and competitive opportunities —and by established programs like the , which identifies exceptional middle schoolers and supports them through college. These programs show what’s possible when talent discovery is treated as a national priority. The country needs many more like them.

The blueprint already exists. The challenge is scale and scope. Policymakers and education leaders can act now by requiring early talent identification in Title I schools and reporting on advanced achievement, not just proficiency; funding advanced learning from the early grades, including acceleration, enrichment and summer study; and backing partnerships among schools, nonprofits and universities that place promising students in rigorous academic settings early and sustain them through college and into careers.

This is more than an equity issue; it’s about America’s competitiveness. The shows that only about a quarter of eighth-graders are proficient in math, and gaps by race and income remain wide. By , Americans who are now labeled minorities will collectively be the majority. If the nation keeps overlooking talent in the communities growing fastest, it will be choosing decline over dynamism.

The nation’s talent is its greatest asset — but only if it is found and developed wherever it lives. Strength will come not from shrinking advanced opportunities, but from expanding them so every child with potential has a fair chance to reach the top.