HOUSE OVERSIGHT 019432 LEDA has been very successful. Of the 500 or so students who have graduated from the program, three quarters have gone on to top-tier colleges, 30 percent of them to the Ivy League. Among LEDA's 2012 graduates alone, 19 gained admission to Princeton, 11 to Georgetown and 6 to the University of Pennsylvania. Last week I took a walk around Red Hook, Brooklyn, with Joshua El-Bey, a LEDA graduate who was leaving in a few days for his sophomore year at Yale. His family struggled as he grew up, moving often and ultimately landing in the Red Hook Houses, the borough's largest public housing development. His first memories of book learning, he told me, were the readings his mother delivered from Genesis when he was 2. What was disconcerting about Mr. El-Bey's otherwise incredibly inspiring trajectory was how much of his success had depended on opportunities outside the public education system. Bullied in middle school for his studiousness, Mr. El-Bey hoped to gain admission to one of the city's elite specialized public high schools, but he did not do well enough on the entrance exam. The free tutoring provided by the city for the test was insufficient, he said. He ended up at Edward R. Murrow in Midwood, Brooklyn, a good school whose academics were nevertheless surpassed by the supplemental training he received as a scholar at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an organization begun 50 years ago by Manhattan lawyers and advertising executives as a mentoring program to get poor minority students into good colleges. Today it essentially provides a shadow education. In school, Mr. El-Bey told me, he simply learned to "regurgitate facts." Programs like LEDA and S.E.O. are popular with wealthy, supremely educated donors, precisely because of outcomes like Mr. El-Bey's. Just this May, the financier Henry R. Kravis pledged $4 million in matching gifts to S.E.O. And in a city as dense with talent and money as New York, the effects of suc