MIKE FEINBERG AND DAVE LEVIN met in Los Angeles in July 1992, at the summer training institute of a new program for recently graduated college students called Teach For America. The idea was to take the brightest products of the nation’s finest colleges and sign them up for two-year commitments to teach in the worst classrooms in the largest and poorest cities and most backward rural communities.
The creator of Teach For America, a Princeton graduate named Wendy Kopp, was just a year older than Feinberg and three years older than Levin. She was not naive. She acknowledged that her idea carried some risk. But at the very least, the Teach For America corps members would learn something useful about this part of society. In the future, when they became lawyers and doctors and financiers, she hoped they would remember their Teach For America years and use their money and political influence to ease the poverty they had witnessed firsthand.
Levin and Feinberg agreed with the concept. Like many Teach For America recruits, they couldn’t think of anything better to do. They weren’t ready for graduate school. They weren’t ready for real jobs. This sounded like an adventure. The other corps members were all their age. It was like an extra two years of college—some drudgery during the day but still time for fun at night.
They had both been assigned to teach in Houston, so they bunked in the dormitory at California State University, Northridge that the summer institute organizers dubbed Texas House. They ate dinner together the first night at a barbecue to welcome the new trainees. They noticed the basketball courts nearby before they noticed each other.
The first words Feinberg remembers saying to Levin after being introduced were, “Hey, Dave, do you play basketball?”
“Yeah, I play a little,” Levin said. Feinberg soon discovered this was typical Levin understatement, a way to both charm strangers and put them at a disadvantage.
In the summer of 1992, Teach For America was just one of dozens of plans to fix what was proving to be the most intractable and devastating social problem in the country—the stubborn persistence of poverty and ignorance in the country’s biggest cities and smallest farm towns. Most American public schools in the suburbs were adequate, and some were quite good. But the 25 percent of schools at the bottom of the academic and social scale were mostly awful and not getting any better. Their students were at a severe disadvantage in making lives for themselves that did not repeat the cycle of poverty from which their parents and grandparents had found no escape.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal government’s sampling test of student achievement, showed almost no progress in reading for nine-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, and seventeen-year-olds between 1971 and 1992. Math achievement was only a little better, with nine-years-olds improving by ten points, thirteen-years-olds by three points, and seventeen-year-olds by two points during those twenty-one years.
In urban school districts, about 40 percent of fourth graders could not read well enough to study independently. Their progress for the rest of their school days was likely to be slow and to hit a dead end of adult illiteracy and frequent unemployment. After a 1983 national report, A Nation at Risk, pointed out how badly many students were doing, several states raised teacher salaries and created new tests to measure both student progress and teacher competence. But millions of low-income children continued to fail to learn to read, write, and do math well enough to go to college or get a good job. Many people accepted this as inevitable. A 2001 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll found that 46 percent of Americans thought only some students had the ability to reach a high level of learning.
One widely discussed educational remedy was a national program of learning standards that would set a goal for all public schools to make a certain amount of progress each year, particularly with disadvantaged students. Schools would be made accountable, proponents said. State and local governments would provide extra support for those schools that did not make the grade. The federal government would budget extra dollars for the effort.
Shortly before Feinberg and Levin reached Los Angeles, the administration of President George H. W. Bush adopted such a plan, called America 2000, which would evolve into the Goals 2000 program. Several Democratic governors, including Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Richard W. Riley of South Carolina, had supported the idea. They had created similar accountability programs so that multinational companies would no longer be reluctant to build plants and offices in their states for fear that the public schools would not be good enough to provide skilled workers and would not be able to prepare the children of their executives for college.
Some scholars and legislators, many of them politically conservative, supported a different kind of school reform. They argued that the public school system was a monopoly with little incentive to improve because it had no competition. They recommended two changes: a system of tax-funded scholarships, called vouchers, that would allow public school students to attend private schools, and a new category of public school, called a charter school, that would be run by energetic educators with fresh ideas who would not have to follow the usual school district funding, hiring, and curriculum policies. In particular, they said, charter schools would not be beholden to teachers’ unions and work rules that sometimes lessened the available time for teaching.
Over the next fifteen years, these two strands of reform—sometimes in opposition, sometimes in an uneasy alliance—would come to dominate educational policy and provide the conditions that allowed Feinberg and Levin’s schools to flourish. Each side of the debate would produce one far-reaching change in the way public schools operated. The Goals 2000 program evolved into a bipartisan federal law, the No Child Left Behind Act. It required schools to raise the achievement of black, Hispanic, and low-income children or risk being taken over by outsiders who would pursue those goals. At the same time, the movement to challenge the power of public school bureaucrats would lead to an upsurge of public charter schools, particularly in large cities. This would provide a haven for Levin-Feinberg methods such as longer school days and school years, principals’ power to fire poorly performing teachers, and regular visits to students’ homes.
Teach For America, in its first year in 1990, sent about five hundred very inexperienced teachers into inner-city and rural classrooms. Thirty percent of them did not fulfill their two-year commitments. Some of the most prominent experts on teacher training in the nation’s most highly regarded education schools said Teach For America was a terrible idea: it subjected the low-income students it claimed to help to clumsy, ill-trained, inexperienced teachers who would do much harm.
But most principals who hired the corps members said they appreciated their energy and enthusiasm. The number of school districts in the program grew. Levin and Feinberg were among more than 560 new corps members in 1992. The program would continue to grow so rapidly that by 2007 there would be 3,000 new recruits, for a total Teach For America corps of more than 5,000. Less than 10 percent dropped out after their first year. On many college campuses, Teach For America would become the leading single employer of recent graduates.
FEINBERG’S EXUBERANT SELF-DEPRECATION and gregariousness were what first impressed Levin when they were introduced at the Los Angeles Teach For America barbecue. Feinberg seemed to be one of the nicest, funniest, and most social human beings Levin had ever met. Everyone loved Mike. He became the nucleus of their group, as he had often been with his friends in high school and college. Levin was happy to be in his orbit.
Levin had just turned twenty-two and looked younger. He had dark, curly hair and a wide-eyed smile. He was quieter than Feinberg, but not shy. His self-confidence was particularly evident when he was talking to women. Feinberg would turn twenty-four in October, having completed his undergraduate studies at Penn a year late, after taking time off to earn some money as a bartender. He wore his brown hair long then, often in a ponytail, but in a very few years most of his hair would be gone.
Feinberg and Levin bonded quickly over their mutual fondness for putting themselves into situations for which they were ill prepared. When their group in Texas House ran out of beer one night, they heard one thirsty trainee say she had a car but didn’t want to drive to a liquor store that late. Feinberg decided to impress the young woman by chivalrously volunteering to take her keys and do the errand for her. He invited Levin along.
“You know how to drive a stick shift?” Feinberg asked Levin.
“No.”
“Well, that’s okay. I got it.”
In the car, Feinberg turned the key and listened with satisfaction as the engine roared to life. Then he turned to his new friend and said, “You know, I really don’t know how to drive a stick either.” Levin smiled. This was his kind of guy. They set off anyway, the gears grinding and the engine stalling, grinding and stalling, as they lurched down Reseda Boulevard.
In planning their days at the institute, Levin and Feinberg agreed that the afternoon courses in classroom management and educational theory were mostly a waste of time. They read all the mimeographed materials and completed the projects required. But they almost never went to class. They took their morning student-teaching duties at inner-city Los Angeles schools much more seriously. The bus picked them up at 7:00 a.m. That was much earlier than they were accustomed to rising in college, but they were always on time, properly attired in dress shirts, ties, and khaki pants.
Feinberg was assigned to Latona Avenue Elementary School. On the first day, he observed the class. On the second day, he was supposed to teach a lesson for an hour. But his mentor teacher thought that was baby stuff. “Look, Mike,” she said. “This is sink or swim. I’m not going to have you teach for just an hour. You are going to take over the whole class.” He taught the class nearly every morning for the next three weeks. It was difficult, and a bit frightening, but his mentor teacher guided him along. He thought he made progress.
Levin’s mentor teacher, on the other hand, mostly ignored him. She gave him a small group of students and a list of questions to review with them. She did not offer many suggestions. This part of the day, he thought, was proving as useless as the afternoon methodology classes.
At night the Texas House partying resumed, with food and beer and epic basketball games. They were passing time, waiting to go to Houston.