User Profile

Regional Superintendent, Achievement First

Elana Karopkin-Gold is the regional superintendent at Achievement First, where she manages several high school superintendents and is responsible for overseeing high school programming and the college access team across the Achievement First network. While 100% of Achievement First scholars are accepted to college, at its core, Elana?s role is to ensure that those scholars graduate from college and defy national statistics. Prior to joining Achievement First, Elana was the founding principal of the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice (SLJ), a public school within the New York City Department of Education, which served students who were overwhelmingly the first in their families to attend college and where over 90% qualified for free and reduced lunch.?At the end of her four-year tenure, 93% of the founding class graduated on time and 100% of them applied to and were accepted to colleges such as Bates, Amherst, Colby, Hamilton, Skidmore, and the CUNY Macaulay Honors Program. Her experience as a leader in urban education also includes roles as a regional literacy specialist, assistant principal, English department head, and English teacher. Elana graduated from Bryn Mawr College and holds an M.A. in English education from New York University, where she received the Jonathan Levin fellowship. She is a Fellow of the 12th class of the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.